tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-129607602024-03-07T23:40:15.847+00:00The ParachuteIt only works when it is open — ⓐ I claim no rights other than attributionUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-16321985085404661172016-02-11T12:21:00.000+00:002016-02-11T12:21:19.683+00:00Are ‘predatory’ journals completely negative, or also a sign of something positive? *<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-small;">* This post was first published on the <a href="http://blog.scielo.org/en/2016/02/02/are-predatory-journals-completely-negative-or-also-a-sign-of-something-positive/" target="_blank">SciELO in Perspective</a> blog, on February 2nd, 2016 (and translations in <a href="http://blog.scielo.org/blog/2016/02/02/seriam-os-periodicos-predatorios-totalmente-negativos-ou-tambem-um-sinal-de-algo-positivo/" target="_blank">Portuguese</a> and <a href="http://blog.scielo.org/es/2016/02/02/son-las-revistas-depredadoras-algo-completamente-negativo-o-tambien-una-senal-de-algo-positivo/" target="_blank">Spanish</a> are available on SciELO in Perspective as well).</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">It’s not nice for parents to find that their toddler child is telling lies – or at least trying to tell lies. But is it so bad? It seems that the ability to tell lies is a sign of a well-developing theory of mind. And a well-developed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind" target="_blank">theory of mind</a> is very helpful in social interaction and things like having empathy would be very difficult without it. So if your child is beginning to tell lies, it might be cause for celebration rather than regret! [1] Of course, it doesn’t mean that lying should be unconditionally encouraged, but a well-developed theory of mind may actually help in developing proper morals as well when the child grows up.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The emergence of so-called ‘predatory journals’ (see <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/" target="_blank">Beall’s list of predatory publishers</a></span><span class="s1">) could be seen in a similar light. Predatory journals are not desirable, it goes without saying, but the fact that they come about is a sign of a developing market, and a true market in scientific publishing services is a good thing, in my view. A true market offers choice to the party who pays. In the classical subscription model of scholarly journal literature, the party who pays is typically the institutional library, and they have little or no choice as to which journal to subscribe to and which not, if the journals are considered to be relevant to the research being carried out at their institution. And if they are forced to make a choice, for instance because of lack of funds, it is an agonising decision which choice to make.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In some countries – in Latin America, but also The Netherlands, for instance – the government is playing a direct role in negotiations with publishers to provide access to scientific literature. In principle, this results in a single buyer, countering the effect of a publisher monopoly by being able to bring much more negotiating clout to the table, and as a result quite possibly wider access (as is indeed being reported from Latin America [2</span><span class="s2">]</span><span class="s1">). But it doesn’t amount to a functioning market. The absence of a real choice is not remedied. Even a government cannot just choose to provide access to one publisher’s content at the exclusion of others, simply because no single publisher provides all the content the research community needs. And a monopoly (single provider)/monopsony (single buyer) system has drawbacks as well. It has a tendency to lock in a certain balance of powers (or an imbalance; Stockholm Syndrome has been mentioned to me in that regard), and in doing so, presents an impediment to progress in the quest for increasing efficiency at decreasing cost. It removes, or at least diminishes, the incentives of individual or small players to decide to buy or sell at a range of prices and service levels. For authors, for instance, it removes any economic motivation to decide to publish in low-APC journals or to communicate their research results via preprint servers. And it makes it very difficult for new publishing initiatives to gain a foothold.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">A true functioning market is not just ‘peaches and cream’, though, since any true market also attracts rogues. And predatory journals certainly are. (By the way, I remain to be convinced that all publishers and journals on Beall’s list are indeed genuinely predatory; it is my impression that some of his <a href="https://scholarlyoa.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/criteria-2015.pdf" target="_blank">criteria</a> are rather shaky.) The existence of rogues is an inevitability of human nature, I’m afraid, but to authors, the attraction, insofar as there is one, of potentially predatory journals comes in part from their usually low charges and quick publication.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Yet, even with the drawback of being polluted by predatory journals, a functioning market is preferable to a quasi-market, completely dominated by monopolies or monopoly-like players. A system of subscriptions, in which the party who pays – the institutional library – has practically no meaningful choice of what to buy, differs from one of article processing charges (APCs, which make open access possible), in that the party who pays – the author – is the party who does have a meaningful choice of where to submit and publish. So ‘flipping’ the system from subscriptions to APCs does deliver something much more akin to a functioning market, and ‘caveat emptor’, ‘buyer beware’, applies to all markets.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It is not strictly true, of course, that in an APC system the author pays. It is most often the funder who does, by including the means to pay in the authors’ grants. This leads me to think that the subscription system could also be made to work as a quasi-market, if authors (the ones having the real choice) were made aware of the cost of the choices they make. This would be the case if authors had to find or request money in their grants for articles published in subscription journals as well, and not just for articles published in APC-supported open access ones. Imagine what will happen if authors were presented with a bill – of, say, $5000, a reasonable estimate of the collective cost per article of subscription journals; more for so-called ‘prestige’ journals – by their institution for every article they publish in a subscription journal. The likelihood is that they will more often choose APC-supported open venues, especially when it is slowly dawning upon the scientific community that openness in itself is an essential part of the quality of a published article [3].</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Making researchers responsible for the financial aspects of their publishing decisions also fits into the general logic of public policies, which put the responsibility of how grants are used on the researchers, after all. Besides, responsibilities that focus on the per-article publishing costs incurred are naturally more scalable with the growth of research output.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This may even help solving the underlying problem with the current journal publishing system: the conflation of scientific communication and career-advancing reputation management [4]. This goes beyond what publishers do: in many cases, the same institutions in charge of purchase decisions of journals are also in charge of research promotion and evaluation, which is mostly – if unjustifiably – based on journal prestige, which may well constitute a conflict of interest. The consequence of separating the two may be that more articles are posted as so-called ‘preprints’ (for communication) and that not all of those are subsequently published in journals (for career purposes), given the cost of the latter. Global preprint repositories such as arΧiv, bioRχiv, and others, would acquire critical importance in that scenario. I am not dismissing the need for reputation building and career progression, but should that really stand in the way of communication for the sake of scientific progress? Is it right that the results of research – particularly of research carried out supported by public funds – should be used primarily for the purpose of authors’ reputation stratification (establishing a ‘pecking order’) via journals, many of which are not openly accessible?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The publishers of journals will say that establishing a pecking order is not their only task, or even their most important one. Most of them maintain that their gate-keeping function, via the peer review they commission, is their true <i>raison d’être</i>. This is a strange argument, as they are only in control of the gate to their tiny little patch of the vast forest. Virtually every article can find a journal in which to be published and so be added to the scholarly literature. What is presented as gate-keeping is in effect just sorting and ranking articles according to vague criteria such as ‘quality’ or ‘relevance’ and therefore not distinguishable from establishing a pecking order. It may help some scientists, but it doesn’t help science. On the contrary: scientific communication is being held hostage by pecking order concerns. And what’s more, these efforts are costing the scientific community a great deal. In time, money, and impediments to sharing knowledge.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It bears repeating: scientific communication and reputation management should not be combined in the same system.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Apart from the obvious costs mentioned, this kind of ‘gate-keeping’ is abusing peer review. Not only does it cause ‘cascading’, many articles being rejected, resubmitted elsewhere, being rejected again, et cetera, until they are eventually accepted. At each stage needing peer review again, and so being a tremendous burden on peer reviewers. Peer review should be aimed at helping authors to improve their articles, by questioning assertions, methods, and the like, and only as a last resort rejecting for publication (in the way of some open access journals such as PLOS-One). In this light, the emergence of ‘easy’ journals, even ‘predatory’ ones, is not miraculous. It takes some getting used to, I presume, but I see great potential in an approach like this: author-arranged open peer review [5].</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Jan Velterop</span></div>
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<span class="s1">References</span></div>
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1. PAN DING, X; <i>et al</i>. Theory-of-Mind Training Causes Honest Young Children to Lie. <i>Psychological Science.</i> 2015, vol. 26 nº 11, pp. 1812-1821. DOI: <span class="s3"><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797615604628">10.1177/0956797615604628</a></span></div>
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<span class="s3">2. </span>Personal communication.</div>
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3. VELTEROP, J. <i>Openness and quality of a published article</i>. SciELO in Perspective. [viewed 27 January 2016]. Available from: <a href="http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/12/16/openness-and-quality-of-a-published-article/"><span class="s3">http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/12/16/openness-and-quality-of-a-published-article/</span></a></div>
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<span class="s1">4.<i> </i></span>VELTEROP, J. <i>Science (which needs communication) first, careers (which need selectivity) later</i>. SciELO in Perspective. [viewed 27 January 2016]. Available from: <span class="s3"><a href="http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/10/29/science-which-needs-communication-first-careers-which-need-selectivity-later/">http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/10/29/science-which-needs-communication-first-careers-which-need-selectivity-later/</a></span></div>
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5.<i> Peer Review by Endorsement (PRE).</i> ScienceOpen. Available from: <span class="s3"><a href="http://about.scienceopen.com/peer-review-by-endorsement-pre/">http://about.scienceopen.com/peer-review-by-endorsement-pre/</a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-53258596669718303922015-08-16T10:29:00.000+01:002015-08-16T10:29:23.896+01:00Peer Review By Endorsement<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Below is the original proposal that eventually led <a href="https://www.scienceopen.com/" target="_blank">ScienceOpen</a> to give it a go and make <a href="http://blog.scienceopen.com/2015/04/welcome-jan-velterop-peer-review-by-endorsement/" target="_blank">'Peer Review by Endorsement'</a> a legitimate, efficient, and affordable alternative to the generally (very) expensive publisher-mediated peer review mechanism we all know.</div>
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It was originally called JONAS, for Journal Of Nature And Science, as a way to indicate the wide potential for this approach in terms of disciplines covered, and yes, a gentle play on the titles of prestige journals, also known sometimes as 'glam' journals :-).<br />
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(The idea of JONAS has something in common, of course, with the idea of overlay journals that have at various times over the last decade and a half been suggested for manuscripts deposited in arXiv, whereby peer review reports were added to them and so giving the article some 'official' publication status.)<br />
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This is the original proposal:<br />
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<span class="s1"><b>JONAS</b> (Journals Of Nature And Science – working title) is a new approach to open access publication of peer-reviewed scientific literature.</span><br /><span class="s1">Establishing a publishing system that addresses:<br /><ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Open access, </li>
<li>Fair and efficient peer review, </li>
<li>Cost of publishing</li>
<li>Speed of publishing</li>
<li>Publication of negative/null results</li>
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</span><span class="s1"><b>Open Access.</b> The JONAS publishing system focuses on the superb technical publication, in various formats/versions, of peer-reviewed articles for optimal machine and human readability and re-use.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="s1"><b>Fair and efficient peer review.</b> Anonymous peer review has problems around issues of transparency, fairness, thoroughness, speed, publisher-bias, specious requests for further experiments or data, and possibly more. JONAS is a system using signed, pre-publication peer review, arranged by the author(s) (many publishers ask authors who to invite to review their papers anyway), and just verified by the publisher (peer review by endorsement). Reviews will be open, published with the article that’s endorsed, non-anonymous, and the rules are that peer-endorsers must be active researchers, and not be, or for at least five years have been, at the same institution as, or a co-author of, any of the authors. Such a peer-review-by-endorsement system is likely to be at least as good as, and quite probably better than, the currently widespread ‘black box’ of anonymous peer review. As reviews/endorsements would be signed and non-anonymous, there is very little danger of sub-standard articles being published, as endorsers/reviewers would not want to put their reputations at risk. The review process between authors and endorsers is likely to be iterative, resulting in improvements on the original manuscripts. “Author-arranged” may include peer review being done by services specifically set up for that purpose, as long as the reviewers are not anonymous and conform to the JONAS rules. </span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1"></span><span class="s1"><b>Cost of publishing.</b> A system like this can be very cost-effective for authors. The technical costs of publishing are but a fraction of the cost usually quoted for organising and arranging peer review. First indication is that an amount in the order of a few hundred pounds sterling (£) per article can be sustainable, given sufficient uptake. Tiered charges could be considered depending on the state of the manuscript when submitted. If the manuscript needs very little work to bring it up to proper publishing standards, or if the author doesn’t want or need those services, the cost can be very low indeed.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1"><b>Speed of publishing.</b> Since the peer-review-by-endorsement process has already taken place before the article arrives at the publisher, publication can ensue within days, even hours, depending on the state of the manuscript.</span><br /><span class="s1">Requirements for manuscripts: ORCIDs for authors and reviewers/endorsers; inclusion of (permanent links to) datasets used, underlying data for graphs, a section “details for replicability and reproducibility” with clear and unambiguous identification of materials used, including reagents, software and other non-standard tools and equipment.</span><span class="s1"> </span><span class="s1"><b>Input</b>: Properly endorsed articles to be accepted in the form of Word, Pages, (LA)TEX, XML, HTML, Markdown, and Excel or CSV for data, and high-resolution image files (where possible scalable vector graphics) via an upload site or attached to emails.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1"><b>Output</b>: Articles would be published as XML, HTML, PDF, ODF and ePub formats, as much as possible semantically enriched and aesthetically formatted, plus Excel/CSV for data (tables extractable and rendered in Excel from PDFs with software freely supplied).</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1"><b>Commenting and post-publication review</b>: to be enabled and encouraged for all articles, links to comments to be provided with each article. Comments may be made on different sites, and will be linked to, if that is the case. Anonymous comments will be ignored.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1"><b>Access Licences</b>: CC-BY or CC0 — DOIs for the articles would be assigned/arranged by JONAS.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1"><b>The core of the JONAS system</b> is effectively to have OA journals with a low-cost structure, with superb and highly optimised technical quality of the published articles (machine-readability and re-useability!). The principal difference with other OA journals would be the pre-arranged open peer review ("peer-review-by-endorsement"), organised by the authors themselves, according to a set of rules that ensures a reasonable level of assurance against reviewer bias (because of its openness and non-anonymity, actually more assurance than is provided in the usual anonymous peer review as widely practiced). Since arranging peer review is one of the major costs of any publisher (mostly staff costs), leaving that part of the publishing process in the hands of researchers and the academic community can make a great difference to the cost of publication. So far, efforts to reduce the cost of publishing have been concentrated on technical issues. Changing the mechanism (emphatically not the principle) of peer review offers much greater scope for cost reduction.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1">What JONAS' job would be is to take such peer-endorsed articles and make them into professionally published and complete (including data and metadata) documents, adhering to all the technical, presentational and unique identifier standards, in a number of formats, linked and linkable to databases and other relevant information, human- and machine-readable and suitable for widespread usage, for text- and data-mining, for structured analysis (incl. semantic analysis) and further knowledge discovery, and, crucially, for long-term preservation in repositories and archives of any kind.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1">Any manuscript submitted in advance of peer-endorsement having been procured, would be placed, ‘as is’, on JonasPrePubs, a ‘preprint’ server, at no cost.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1">The JONAS publishing system is also <b>superbly suited to scientific societies</b> and other groupings that wish to have their own journal. Such a journal can be fully integrated in the JONAS system, provided the manuscripts are submitted fully peer-endorsed or peer-reviewed (whether or not arranged by the author(s) or the scientific society in question).</span> <span class="s1">The charges per manuscript for individual authors and for societies wishing to publish their journals in the JONAS system would be the same.</span> </blockquote>
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<span class="s1">The JONAS methodology could be implemented on various publishing platforms.</span></blockquote>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-66051507025047654772015-07-20T15:31:00.000+01:002015-07-20T15:31:40.133+01:00Levelling the Open Access – Paywall Playing Field for Authors<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Early career researchers are often reported to express the view that they face a dilemma. Submit to – and hopefully publish in – an open access journal, with possibly a relatively low impact factor, or in a traditional, pay-walled journal with a relatively high impact factor.</div>
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Given the large number of traditional pay-walled journals with low, or no, impact factors, I find this not the most credible argument. And even for ‘glam’ journals there are now good open access alternatives.</div>
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And yet, there are moments when I understand researchers when they are having to decide where to submit their papers. Do they choose an older subscription-supported journal, or a younger APC-supported open access journal? In the latter case, they’ll have to find the funds to pay the Article Processing Charge; in the former, they don’t, since subscriptions are paid out of the library budget. It does make a difference to a researcher's perception. Even though in many cases it is the funder who provides the money for the APCs, the researchers are aware of the cost and part of the decisions they take are financial/economic ones, even if sometimes subconsciously. They are not confronted with financial/economic decisions if they submit to a paywalled journal. Convenience may set in, perhaps in the form of a certain laziness, and a decision to stick with the old hassle-free subscription journals is easily taken.</div>
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It may happen here and there, but what I have not seen is attempts by the library community to confront researchers with the cost of paywalled journals. I'm not talking about the subscription price, but about the cost to the system of a single paper published in such a journal. It is a significant cost. For subscription journals published by the major publishers, this is on average in excess of $5000 (there are differences depending on the publisher), and for the ‘glam’ journals presumably more, much more (<span class="s1">Phil Campbell, editor-in-chief of <i>Nature</i>, <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676" target="_blank">estimated costs of $30,000–40,000 per paper in 2013</a></span><span class="s2">.</span> That’s costs to the publisher; costs to the system will be higher, as they include profits.)</div>
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Now imagine that universities, perhaps via their libraries, take care of any payment to publishers, be they subscription charges or APCs, and then reclaim a per-article fee from their grants whenever researchers publish their articles. The amounts for APCs identical to the amount charged by the open access journal in question, of course; the amounts for articles in subscription journals on the basis of the average per-article revenue of the publisher of those journals. (These amounts may be reasonable estimates, I imagine, as they will seldom be known in detail.) The amounts thus reclaimed for articles in subscription journals could then be used for the journal acquisitions budget. </div>
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I have no illusion that this would solve all the problems of the cost of scientific publication, but it will increase general awareness of the true cost of publishing in subscription journals, and may help to level the playing field, to use an old cliché, between open access and pay-walled literature in the mind of scientists at the point when they decide where to publish their papers. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-31151699933103178682015-07-07T10:24:00.000+01:002015-07-07T10:24:09.751+01:00Dealing with information overload*<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2f2f2f; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Are we overwhelmed by the amount of scientific information that is being published? PubMed adds an average of more than two abstracts a minute to its database, and that is just in the life and medical sciences. If that doesn’t amount to information overload, what does?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #2f2f2f; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">[<a href="http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/05/18/dealing-with-information-overload/" target="_blank">More...</a>]</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #2f2f2f; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">*</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2f2f2f; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">This post was first published May 18th 2015 on the SciELO blog. The '<a href="http://blog.scielo.org/en/2015/05/18/dealing-with-information-overload/" target="_blank">more</a>' link redirects to that blog.</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-2781544018127731022015-05-07T09:13:00.000+01:002015-05-07T09:13:22.053+01:00Keeping the Minutes of Science – Looking back 20 years<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I attended the Royal Society discussions on the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication, held in <a href="https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/04/future-of-scholarly-scientific-communication-part-1/" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/05/future-of-scholarly-scientific-communication-part-2/" target="_blank">sessions</a> of two days, the last one ending yesterday. Most interesting meetings. (Tweets from the meetings under the hash tag #FSSC).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The discussions brought back memories of an article I wrote 20 years ago, on "Keeping the Minutes of Science". I re-read it this morning, and it is interesting (to me at any rate) how my thoughts have evolved, from just before the introduction of what later became known as the 'Big Deal', when this article was written, via becoming an <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" target="_blank">Open Access advocate</a> a few years later (before it was even called open access yet) to proposing to <a href="http://blog.scienceopen.com/2015/04/welcome-jan-velterop-peer-review-by-endorsement/" target="_blank">change the way peer review is done</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was at Academic Press at the time (well before it was taken over by Elsevier), which may explain some of the thoughts I then had. I am posting the full article below. (The bibliographic reference to the original is </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">J.J.M. Velterop, “Keeping the Minutes of Science.” In: Electronic library and visual information research (Elvira 2). Edited by Mel Collier and Kathryn Arnold. Proceedings of the second ELVIRA conference, held in May 1995 at De Montfort University, Milton Keynes. Aslib. 1995, pp 11-17.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The article:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">KEEPING THE MINUTES OF SCIENCE</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">INTRODUCTION<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Scientific journal publishing differs markedly from most other kinds of publishing.
Born out of the exchange of letters on scientific topics and results, it has evolved into
as much a service to scientists who need to publish the results of their work, as a
service to those who need to be kept abreast of scientific developments elsewhere.
Unlike most other publishing, scientific journal publishing has as much to do with the
proper recording of scientific activity as with the conveyance of information. As far as
the latter is concerned, scientists do not rely on scientific journals alone any more, in
order to keep informed. Journals are only one of the variety of ways in which
scientists gather scientific information. However, scientific information that comes to
a scientist via a scientific journal still carries the highest degree of authority for
information, as it has been peer reviewed and gone through a certification and
validation process before reaching the reader.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For the author a scientific journal is essential. There are currently no other ways for a
scientist to get his work certified and validated than publishing in a journal of good
reputation. This certification and validation process is of immense value to science. It
is to a large degree the result of a long self-organising process that has grown into a
highly sophisticated structure (including a “pecking order” of journals) in which
scientific results are placed in a hierarchical context, are ‘taxonomised’, standardised,
formalised, made accessible through a uniform and globally accepted reference
system. It forms the backbone of a scientific archive.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Scientists, libraries and publishers share a responsibility to protect and safeguard this
elegant system of “keeping the minutes of science”. Collapse of this system is
something science can ill afford, even though in the future it is quite possible that new
systems will arise and eventually be standardised and become globally accepted. A
hiatus of a number of years, however, will do great damage to the continuity of
scientific research and if there is to be a transition into a new situation, it has to be
carefully managed.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This paper does not deal with the issue of print journals versus electronic journals.
Journal publishing is discussed as a concept, independent of the medium. It is
obviously recognised that the introduction of digital technology can change the way
journals are being used and this technology can help achieve efficiencies that were
hitherto impossible. But the concept of a journal remains essentially unchanged.<br />
</span><br />PROPOSITIONS<br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">1. If not properly published, scientific results are fairly useless — because usually
indistinguishable from speculation.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In most democracies, anybody is free to publish anything that is not obscene or
libellous, and there are quite a few countries where one can get away with that as
well. Whether it is true, whether the argument is not flawed, whether it is ambiguous,
whether it is informative, whether it is new, whether it is original, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">etcetera</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, is quite
another matter. The level of reliability of unaccredited publications is not known. It
may be high or dismally low. Although the unaccredited material may be intrinsically
reliable, the fact that it is not reasonably certain that it is, makes it unreliable. In order
to substantially increase the chance that all or most of the above can be relied upon as
representing the current state of knowledge, peer reviewed scientific journals evolved.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In the beginning, at the time the first scientific journals were established (1655, </span>LE
JOURNAL DES SÇAVANS<span style="font-size: 12pt;">, France, quickly followed later in the same year by
</span>PHYLOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> of the Royal Society of London), peer review
did not yet exist. But it became clear fairly soon that not everything submitted was fit
for publication and criteria for admission were developed, although journal articles
were initially not regarded as definitive publications, as the mature research results
would still finally be written up in monographs</span><span style="font-size: 8pt; vertical-align: 6pt;">1</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It would be a mistake to believe that peer review ensures quality and integrity of the
material at all times. The American of Research Integrity (</span>ORI<span style="font-size: 12pt;">) can testify to that.
However, the chance of finding total nonsense in established peer reviewed journals is
slight. Peer review does not only ensure a good measure of </span>QIVAS<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> (Quality,
Integrity, Veracity, Accuracy, and Security)</span><span style="font-size: 8pt; vertical-align: 6pt;">2</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, but also a hierarchy, not just of
importance, but of relevance to the central issues of the discipline concerned as well.
On top of this, publication in a journal provides priority and authority (in the original
sense of established authorship). Results cannot easily be ‘hijacked’ any more once
they are received by, and published in, a reputable journal and (undetected and
uncontested) plagiarism becomes pretty difficult, too. Published results have, by
virtue of having been published in a peer reviewed journal, become part of the
accepted and acknowledged body of scientific knowledge or theory.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">2. The growth in numbers of scientific papers is outside the influence or control of
publishers.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The laws of supply and demand do not apply in a straightforward way to scientific
information. As Bernard Naylor has described it: “If there is an excess of supply over
demand in the journals industry, and there seems no prospect of an increase in
demand, the obvious alternative is that supply ought to fall. However, whichever way
you look at it, supply is tending to increase. The normal self-readjusting tension
between supply and demand fails to operate”</span><span style="font-size: 8pt; vertical-align: 6pt;">3</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">But we should not forget that it is the scientists’ very job to uncover and add to the
body of knowledge!<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Currently, the number of scientific articles published per year seems to be increasing
fairly constantly within the order of 4 to 6 percent. This poses great problems to the
global scientific community. ‘Twigging’ of disciplines and further specialisation is
still the most common response. As long as the need and desire for insight into natural </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">phenomena grows, scientific activity grows, and with scientific activity, scientific
publications. Scientific papers are, however, not just used to record and convey
results. They are also used to advance careers and boost egos. Indeed, in many
situations they are the single most important measure of a scientist’s performance.
And not just scientists are being measured by the number of their papers, but entire
departments and whole research institutions as well.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Growth of scientific material seems inevitable. It is becoming more and more
difficult, of course, to be sure that one’s paper will actually be seen by the majority of
the intended audience. So apart from ‘slicing’ their results into many papers which
one would do for reasons of career advancement, some researchers resort to this
technique in order to increase their chance to be ‘found’. Further growth of the
amount of published material will only make this a more attractive (some would say
necessary) option, in order to increase the ‘signal to noise ratio’, so to speak.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Publishers do not increase the amount of scientific articles; scientists do, driven by
‘publish-or-perish’ and performance criteria, but essentially just doing what they are
expected to do and what they are paid for. Publishers only respond to the phenomenon
and as often as not, also experience it as a problem. The irony is that the very same
governments that insist on proving maximum performances with published papers are
the first to cut the budgets that, by way of paying for subscriptions to the journals,
support the mechanisms that make publication of those papers possible.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">3. Scientific articles should be published only for their scientific merit, not for their
commercial merit.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">One of the attractions of the current model in which articles are published in the
context of journals is that no commercial judgement is passed. The only reason why
an article is accepted or rejected is its quality or relevance to the particular forum that
the journal constitutes. This is done exclusively by the active scientists who act as
editors-in-chief, members of editorial boards, and reviewers of the journals, with no
interference from the publisher. Particularly not if the publisher is independent of a
particular scientific constituency and is unencumbered by any possible scientific (or
even political) controversy or secret agenda.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Independent journal publishing differs markedly from book publishing, where the
market potential also has a large influence on the decisions, made by the publishers,
on whether or not to publish. Scientifically worthy books are, as a rule, not published
if insufficient prospective buyers can be found.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The fact that journal articles are published on their scientific merits only is worth
preserving. Market forces may (and will) introduce an improper bias. Just as it is
improper to sell academic degrees, it would be improper to give undue preference to
scientific results coming from wealthier institutes or companies. This would be likely
to happen, though, if commercial criteria were introduced for the publication of
primary research results. Wider distribution than the normal journal circulation is
already being sponsored for certain articles. This is a welcome source of income to
publishers and likely to influence decisions if the current system of publishing purely
on scientific merit is compromised.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is a realistic risk, though, as publishing on exclusively scientific criteria is being
threatened by the advent of P3, or Pay-Per-Paper, a.k.a. Pay-per-View (in electronic </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">environments), document delivery (DocDel) or individual article supply (</span>IAS<span style="font-size: 12pt;">). After
all, except in extraordinary circumstances, no publisher, independent or associated
with a scientific society, will want to commit resources to the publishing of an article
which offers no, or very limited, potential for recouping the investment through sales
of the article. Such an </span>IAS<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> system is likely to favour publication of articles with clear
commercial potential. In practice, this is likely to mean articles written by well-known
scientists from English speaking countries, especially the United States (for that is
where a major market will be found), and from universities or research centres with
resounding names, or companies with deep pockets which are willing to sponsor the
publication. It is not difficult to imagine claims of cultural and commercial
imperialism in such a scenario.</span></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">4. Information is not a commodity.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The Oxford dictionary defines ‘commodity’ as “...a thing of use or value, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">spec. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">a thing
that is an object of trade, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">esp. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">a raw material or agricultural crop”. The only faithfully
recorded instant when commodities behaved like information occurred almost 2000
years ago. It concerned loaves and fish, and the emphasis should be on ‘faithfully’,
not on ‘recorded’. Since then, it has not happened again that one could give away a
commodity like a loaf of bread and still have it. It can be done with information,
though!<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It follows that information cannot truly be expected to have the same economic
properties as commodities. Sharing information does not mean the same as sharing a
bushel of wheat, unless it takes the form of keeping the first five pages of an article to
oneself and giving the other five to someone else. Hence the virtually worldwide
establishment of legal constructions like copyright, which are awkward and imperfect,
but the only means currently available to make sure that the necessary resources
remain to be committed to the recording and dissemination of information. It would
be attractive for purchasers of information to treat it as a commodity, especially given
its ‘loaf-and-fish’ properties. What really is copying of information and document
delivery is known as ‘resource sharing’, or sometimes goes under the euphemism of
‘interlibrary loan’. The potential is enormous: take out one subscription per country
and share it with all the other libraries. The law permits it! It doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to see the consequences, though.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">5. The real product of scientific journal publishers is not paper, not distribution, not
content, but the service of providing a structured forum for scientific discourse.
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">But alas, information is not a commodity and it is not even the publishers’ product.
Stevan Harnad, editor of the electronic journal </span>PSYCOLOQUY<span style="font-size: 12pt;">, describes in his
paper “Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly
Electronic Journals”</span><span style="font-size: 8pt; vertical-align: 6pt;">4 </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">how his eyes were opened in a conversation with a television
network executive, who told him that </span>TV<span style="font-size: 12pt;">‘s product is not the programmes that are
broadcast, but the viewers’ eyeballs which are sold to the advertisers (although in
many countries outside the </span>USA<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> this would be either not or only partially true).
In a similar vein, scientific journal publishers’ product is not the content (that is the
authors’), not the printed paper (that is the printers’), not the distribution (that is the
mail’s), but the provision of a forum for the conduct of scientific discourse, which
facilitates the proper keeping of the minutes of science. A journal is a concept, not
necessarily a physical entity. The publisher provides a structured (‘pecking order’)
and controlled (‘quality label’) forum, complete with gatekeepers (editor and
reviewers), organisers (indexers for secondary literature and databases), and </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">‘translators’ (although the accepted </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">lingua franca </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">of science seems to have become
English, the ‘real’ language of science is more than this: it is a closely knit framework
of standardisations, rules and conventions, in the interest of precision and the
avoidance of ambiguities, which amounts to a ‘grammar’ and ‘idiom’ that few
scientists fully adhere to; hence the need for ‘translators’, better known as subeditors
or technical editors, who often also provide conventional translation services for those
authors whose native tongue is not English). Almost as an afterthought, publishers
also arrange for composition (typesetting for print; </span>SGML<span style="font-size: 12pt;">-coding for electronic
dissemination), printing or mounting on servers, and subsequent dissemination.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The service of providing a structured and controlled forum is as important for authors
as it is for readers of journals. It is not for nothing that many scientific societies are
charging the authors for publication of their articles. It is inherently fair that both
authors and readers contribute to the maintenance of the forum. Societies are finding
it difficult to keep up the system of page charges, as most independent publishers are
not levying them. The American Physical Society is currently examining its page
charge levies, after an experimental period of suspending page charges for
manuscripts submitted electronically to </span>PHYSICAL REVIEW C<span style="font-size: 12pt;">. One of the
arguments used for continuing the system of page-charges is “...that it is reasonable to
expect research grants to bear some of the publication costs, since publication could
be considered an important aspect of research”</span><span style="font-size: 8pt; vertical-align: 6pt;">5</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">. Most independent publishers have
concentrated on subscriptions as the sole source of financial support for the journals.
Should this lead to journals accepting only papers from researchers at institutions or‘
companies underwriting and supporting the journal via a subscription? It would be
fair, but hardly feasible and introduce a similar potential bias as discussed under
Proposition 3.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">6. Economic models for journal publishing exclusively based on subscriptions are
becoming less viable; the ones based on individual article sales (document delivery)
have never been, nor will ever be viable.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The flaw in the previous proposition is, of course, that publishers in reality derive
their income basically from treating content, printing and dissemination as their
product. Content is first converted into a pseudo-commodity, with the aid of
copyright, and then sold on a just-in-case basis by the subscription, and, reluctantly,
on a just-in-time basis (or just-too-late, as Bernard Naylor aptly describes it!) by the
individual article. The transactional document delivery model is particularly badly
suited to the forum concept of a journal. It reduces the intricate fabric of written
scientific discourse to the one-way street of information provision, devoid of much
contextual and meta information that makes the package of a journal so valuable
(even aside from concessions document delivery makes to browseability and
serendipity). Also, each individual article would have to be purchased hundreds of
times at the prices that currently seem usual, or carry a price tag that is substantially
higher, in order to make it possible that investments in the publication of the articles
could be recouped. But a more serious danger lies in the fact that document delivery
leads to a model in which articles are no longer published on their scientific merit, but
on their commercial merit, as already discussed under Proposition 3.
Subscriptions are not satisfactory any longer either. Library budgets have decreased in
real terms over the last decade, pretty much worldwide. Resource sharing and inter-
library loan are a result, and subscriptions, in combination with fair-use and library
privileges provided by law, are ideally suited to that. Or so it seems. The natural </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">course of events is now that numbers of subscriptions will go down, interlibrary
lending up, subscription prices also up as a consequence, with the result that users’
access to material becomes more difficult or cumbersome; libraries spend their
budgets on administrative chores connected with inter-library loan instead of building
collections in order to optimally serve their constituencies; authors see the potential of
chance encounters of their articles with readers dwindle; scientific societies cease to
exist or are forced to minimise the service to their members; and publishers go out of
business. In short, everyone loses, except, of course, the suppliers of photocopiers and
the paper they churn out.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700;">7. Academic Press is convinced that there are viable alternatives that do much more
justice to the needs of authors, libraries, users, and publishers, without, on the whole
and in total, costing more.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Fortunately, there may be other scenarios. Academic Press clearly sees the plight of
the libraries, which is, by extension, the plight of the entire scientific community.
Supply is not decreasing but increasing, demand is not increasing but decreasing
(economic demand, by the entities that pay; not the end-user demand or the demand
from authors for a vehicle to publish their papers in), so the only alternative left is to
reduce costs. Academic Press is working on paradigms in which subscriptions are
essentially replaced with licences, giving subsequent free electronic access to every
user affiliated with the library taking the licence, thereby essentially reacting to
increasing end-user demand, while at the same time accommodating the dire financial
situation the libraries find themselves in. Options to grant major incentives to
consortia of libraries for taking licences that span a whole range of journals are
currently being explored. We are even including the possibility of offering such
licences to loose consortia of all libraries in a given province, state, or even country,
which are then free to share all the material amongst all members of the consortium in
whatever form (electronically or on paper) and however frequently as is desired. This
scheme is called </span>APPEAL<span style="font-size: 12pt;">, for Academic Press Print and Electronic Access Licence.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In the view of Academic Press, the paradigm of an </span>APPEAL<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> licence would
potentially offer promising benefits to all parties concerned:<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">the authors would have the assurance that their papers are directly available to
a much larger potential audience than is the case now;<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">the libraries would be able to offer the research, teaching and student
community much wider instant access to much more material;<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">the barrier to turning to and browsing through many more sources would be
removed for researchers, students and other library users;<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">the publishers would be able to make the necessary investments in improving
the sophistication of the ‘forum’ and the cost per unit-of-information ratio.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">All this for substantially the same amount of money that is being spent on scientific
literature by libraries now. On top of that, the libraries would be able to make
appreciable savings on costly inter-library loan and cut down, or even eliminate,
expenses for commercial or semicommercial (</span>BLDSC<span style="font-size: 12pt;">) document delivery, at least
regarding current journal material.</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">CONCLUSION<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">A form of formal publishing, whether in print or electronic, remains essential for the
structuring and preservation of the body of scientific knowledge, however many
problems the unrestricted growth of scientific knowledge poses to the global scientific
community. It is imperative that sufficient resources continue to he made available for
this. However, the resources currently used for ‘keeping the minutes of science’ can
be used far more efficiently, doing much more justice to the scientific efforts carried
out and catering much better to the identified needs of the scientific community.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span>REFERENCES<br />
<span style="font-size: 6pt; vertical-align: 5pt;">1 </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Manten, A.A. (1980), Development of European Scientific Journal Publishing before 1850, in:
Meadows, A.J. (Ed) Development in Science Publishing in Europe, Amsterdam, Elsevier.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 6pt; vertical-align: 5pt;">2 </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Lindsay, John (1995), Academics Can Do It For Themselves. Presented at the UK Serials Group
Meeting, UMIST, Manchester, 1994. STM Newsletter; no. 96.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 6pt; vertical-align: 5pt;">3 </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Naylor, Bernard (1994), The Future of the Scholarly Journal. Presented at the General Meeting of
LIBER, July 1994.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 6pt; vertical-align: 5pt;">4 </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Harnad, Stevan (1995), Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in
Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds) Electronic Publishing Confronts
Academia: The Agenda for the Year 2000, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.<br />
</span><span style="font-size: 6pt; vertical-align: 5pt;">5 </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">APS News (American Physical Society), Member Input Sought on Page Charges, 9 March 1995
(11158). </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jan Velterop</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-36240637714840641562015-04-29T10:18:00.000+01:002015-04-29T10:18:34.411+01:00How to take peer review out of the clutches of publishers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You may remember that some time ago I wrote about JONAS – <a href="http://theparachute.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/journals-of-nature-and-science.html" target="_blank">Journals Of Nature And Science</a> – the essence of which was to take peer review out of the clutches of publishers and make it a purely academic responsibility again, what it should be in reality anyway. The result will not only be a cheaper system (by an order of magnitude compared to the current one), but also likely a better, fairer, more expert and possibly faster one. And because publishers' main focus will necessarily be on the technical issues of producing correctly XML-coded, archivable, preservable, findable, machine-readable as well as human readable, text- and data-mineable articles in a variety of formats for different purposes (e.g. XML, HTML, PDF, ePub), the currently often sloppy production may be greatly improved (you'd be surprised at the number of errors in the material published by even the publishers priding themselves most on quality – mixing up β with ß or <u>+</u> with ±, for instance!).<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.scienceopen.com/home" target="_blank">ScienceOpen</a> has decided to follow up on the JONAS idea and recently <a href="http://blog.scienceopen.com/2015/04/welcome-jan-velterop-peer-review-by-endorsement/" target="_blank">announced</a> that they will give authors the option of publisher-free peer review. Needless to say that I'm very pleased with that. Several scientists have remarked that "this is an important experiment" and expressed their hope that it will take off.<br />
<br />
ScienceOpen will probably face some substantial hurdles, as is generally the case with new ideas in the area of scholarly publishing. I'm reminded of the early days of open access, in that regard. However, tenacity and persistence will do a lot to overcome those hurdles, as does help from those in the academic community who would like to progress peer review reform and open access.<br />
<br />
Such help doesn't have to be onerous. Simply talking to colleagues and peers about it, retweeting relevant tweets, mentioning it in blog posts, et cetera, will be of tremendous value. The fact is that ScienceOpen, as a small new outfit, doesn't have a big marketing budget, and therefore relies on word-of-mouth. Moreover, even if they had a larger budget, they would rather refrain from email spamming and the like. In my view, they should be rewarded for that attitude with whatever help those who are sympathetic to new approaches in scholarly publishing can offer.<br />
<br />
And, of course, if you could consider trying out this approach by publishing a paper with the Peer Review by Endorsement method, that would be super.<br />
<br />
Propagating this blog post would be highly appreciated, too, obviously. Many thanks in advance.<br />
<br />
Jan Velterop</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-3595374921504854502014-10-08T13:27:00.000+01:002014-10-08T13:27:02.674+01:00Journals of Nature and Science<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="" name="OLE_LINK14"></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;">Joe Esposito's recent <a href="http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/10/08/stick-to-your-ribs-what-does-a-scientist-want/" target="_blank">post on the Scholarly Kitchen</a> prompted me to post the following proposal, which I have discussed with various people, but which has no takers yet. But who knows what the future holds...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt;">I called the proposed system <b>JONAS</b></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> (for 'Journals Of Nature And Science' – working
title, obviously). It is, I think, a new approach to open access publication of peer-reviewed scientific
literature. If it isn't I've missed something (entirely possible).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">JONAS is about establishing
a publishing system that addresses:</span></div>
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</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Open access,</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Fair and efficient peer review, </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Cost of publishing</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Speed of publishing</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Publication of negative/null results</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Open Access — </span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">The JONAS publishing system focuses on the
superb technical publication, in various formats/versions, of peer-reviewed
articles for optimal machine and human readability and re-use.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Fair and efficient peer review —</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> Anonymous peer review has problems around
issues of transparency, fairness, thoroughness, speed, publisher-bias, specious
requests for further experiments or data, and possibly more. JONAS is a system
using signed, pre-publication peer review, arranged by the author(s) (many
publishers ask authors who to invite to review their papers anyway), and merely verified by the publisher (peer review by endorsement). Reviews would be open,
published with the article that’s endorsed, non-anonymous, under the rules that peer-endorsers must be active researchers, and not be, or for at least
five years have been, at the same institution as, or a co-author of, any of the
authors. Such a peer-review-by-endorsement system is likely to be at least as
good as, and quite probably better than, the currently widespread ‘black box’
of anonymous peer review. As reviews/endorsements would be signed and
non-anonymous, there is very little danger of sub-standard articles being
published (not worse than is currently the case anyway), as endorsers/reviewers would not want to put their reputations at
risk. The review process between authors and endorsers is likely to be
iterative, resulting in improvements on the original manuscripts.
“Author-arranged” may perhaps include peer review being arranged on behalf of the authors by services specifically
set up for that purpose, as long as the reviewers are not anonymous and conform
to the JONAS rules. The <a href="http://www.liberatingresearch.org/" target="_blank">LIBRE service</a> is one example (</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">currently in prototype</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Cost of publishing —</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> A system like this can be very
cost-effective for authors. The technical costs of proper publishing are but a
fraction of the cost usually quoted for organizing and arranging peer review. First
indication is that an amount in the order of £100-150 per article can be sustainable,
given sufficient uptake. Tiered charges should be considered depending on the
state of the manuscript when submitted. If the manuscript needs very little
work to bring it up to proper publishing standards, or if the author doesn’t
want or need those services, the cost could be very low indeed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Speed of publishing —</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> Since the peer-review-by-endorsement
process has already taken place before the article arrives at the publisher,
publication can ensue within days, even hours, depending on the state of the
manuscript.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Requirements
for manuscripts: ORCIDs for authors and reviewers/endorsers; inclusion of (permanent
links to) datasets used, underlying data for graphs, a section “details for
replicability and reproducibility” with clear and unambiguous identification of
materials used, including reagents, software and other non-standard tools and
equipment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Input:
Properly endorsed articles to be accepted in the form of Word, Pages, (LA)TEX,
XML, HTML, Markdown, and Excel or CSV for data, and high-resolution image files
(where possible scalable vector graphics) attached to
emails or via a simple upload site.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Output:
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Articles
would be published as XML, HTML, PDF, ODF and ePub formats</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">, as much as possible semantically enriched
and aesthetically formatted, plus Excel/CSV for data (tables extractable and
rendered in Excel from PDFs with the software to do that, <a href="http://utopiadocs.com/" target="_blank">Utopia Documents</a>, freely supplied).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Commenting
and post-publication review (signed comments and reviews only) would be encouraged for all articles, links to comments to
be provided with each article. Comments may be made on different sites, and
would be linked to, if that is the case. Anonymous comments would be ignored.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Access
Licences: CC-BY or CC0 — DOIs for the articles, and where appropriate for individual elements within articles, would be assigned/arranged by
JONAS.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The core of the
JONAS system</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"> would effectively be to have OA journals with a low-cost
structure, with superb and highly optimized technical quality of the published
articles. The principal difference with other OA journals would be the
pre-arranged open peer review ("peer-review-by-endorsement"),
organised by the authors themselves, according to a set of rules that ensures a
reasonable level of assurance against reviewer bias (because of its openness
and non-anonymity, actually more assurance than is provided in the usual
anonymous peer review as widely practiced). Since arranging peer review is one
of the major costs of any publisher (mostly staff costs), leaving that part of
the publishing process in the hands of researchers and the academic community
can make a great difference to the cost of publication. So far, efforts to
reduce the cost of publishing have been concentrated on technical issues.
Changing the mechanism (emphatically not the principle) of peer review offers
much greater scope for cost reduction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">What JONAS' job would be is to take such peer-endorsed
articles and make them into professionally published and complete (including
data and metadata) documents, adhering to all the technical, presentational and
unique identifier standards, in a number of formats, linked and linkable to
databases and other relevant information, human- and machine-readable and
suitable for widespread usage, for text- and data-mining, for structured
analysis (incl. semantic analysis) and further knowledge discovery, and,
crucially, for long-term preservation in repositories and archives of any kind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">An added service could be that manuscripts submitted in advance of peer-endorsement
having been procured, would be placed, ‘as is’, on JonasPrePubs, a ‘preprint’
server, at no cost. This could help to secure priority (as a kind of 'prophylactic' against high-jacking of ideas – which would never happen in science, of course, but better to be safe than sorry, right?).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The JONAS publishing system would also be <b>superbly suited to scientific societies</b>
and other groupings that wish to have their own journal. Such a journal could be
fully integrated in the JONAS system, provided the manuscripts are submitted
fully peer-endorsed or peer-reviewed (whether or not arranged by the author(s)
or the scientific society in question). The charges per manuscript for
individual authors and for societies wishing to publish their journals in the
JONAS system would be the same, I imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The JONAS methodology could, of course, be implemented on various
publishing platforms.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Jan Velterop</span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-65905145438143030842014-09-08T16:27:00.000+01:002014-09-08T16:27:56.260+01:00Does 'Open Access' include reuse?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="" name="OLE_LINK2"></a><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US">At
the end of 2001, a number of people (me included) came together in Budapest and
set out to give the emerging notion that research results, particularly those
obtained with public funds, should be available and usable by anybody,
anywhere. There wasn’t an agreed term for that notion – ‘free online
scholarship’ (FOS) and ‘free access’ were some of the terms relatively
frequently used – and in Budapest we settled on the term ‘open access’. The
meeting in Budapest resulted in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and
in the declaration issued a few months later, we explained what we meant by
‘open access’ of the scholarly peer reviewed research literature:</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free
availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download,
copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles,
crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">use them for any other lawful purpose</b>, without financial, legal, or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the
internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the
only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over
the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and
cited.</span></span></i></span></span></blockquote>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While this definition has a flaw – there is no mention
of immediacy in it – it clearly does include the right to reuse.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US">So why has there be a recantation of one of the
original signatories of the BOAI definition (perhaps more than one, but that I
don’t know, and I doubt it)? And why has the BOAI definition been watered down,
even adulterated, by some other people. ‘Free access’, ‘gratis access’, ‘public
access’, etc. all disregard reuse, a crucial element of the notion of ‘open
access’ and of its BOAI definition (as well as of the Bethesda and Berlin
Statements on OA – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“</i></span></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">The author(s) and
copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide,
perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">use</b>, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make
and distribute <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">derivative works</b>, in
any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution
of authorship.”</span></i></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US">). The Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY) best captures the intention of these definitions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What are the motives of those who don’t like CC-BY and the reuse element of the BOAI/Bethesda/Berlin definitions and do what they can to water it all down to access without reuse?<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Are these some?<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<ul>
<li><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Expediency – giving up difficult to reach ideals for potentially easier to reach, though sub-optimal, goals;</span></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Appeasement – giving in to established powers and processes;</span></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Putting career advancement above the advancement of science;</span></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span lang="EN-US" style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">General contrarianism.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-align: left; text-indent: -18pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US">Quite possibly a combination of these, and more. Let’s have an open dialogue,
including as John Wilbanks suggested, “about </span></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US">the ways publishers are exploiting green
to undermine OA.</span></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US">”<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Comments welcome.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jan Veltero</span>p</span></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-57071930025584196482014-09-04T14:22:00.000+01:002014-09-04T14:22:56.447+01:00Achieving True Open Access Ain’t Easy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In December of
2001, a <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" title="See bottom of linked web page">number of people</a> who wanted to
increase the efficacy and usefulness of scholarly communication, particularly research
results published in the peer-reviewed journal literature, came together in
Budapest. Quickly, a consensus emerged as to what that would <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read" title="See 3rd paragraph in linked web page">mean</a>: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Peer-reviewed journal articles should be
freely available on the public internet, permitting any users to read,
download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these
articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them
for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers
other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The
only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity
of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We called it “Open Access”, and in February of
2002 the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) statement was published. It is
fair to say that we (I was one of them) probably underestimated the difficulty
of reaching the goal we set ourselves. It was – and still is – very difficult. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Shortly after, in December of 2002, the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030124192733/http://creativecommons.org/" title="Creative Commons web page of 24 January 2003">CC-BY</a> (Creative
Commons Attribution) licence was <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020913043654/http://www.creativecommons.org/">publicly
released</a>, which captured the letter and spirit of the BOAI notion of Open
Access very well. For a while, Open Access and CC-BY were, to all intents and
purposes, synonymous.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Apart from stating a goal, we also came up
with two strategies to achieve it (later called ‘green’ and ‘gold’,
respectively):</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Self-archiving, by the author(s), in open electronic archives or
repositories, manuscript versions of articles (to be) published in traditional
subscription journals – later called the ‘green’ road;</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -18pt;">Publishing ‘born-open-access’ articles in journals set up to provide open
access to the formally published version at the point of publication – later
called the ‘gold’ road.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The strategies
were straightforward, it seemed. That proved to be an illusion. Strategy one,
self-archiving (‘green’), was based on the idea that authors’ manuscripts, even
after they had been peer-reviewed and accepted by subscription journals, were
covered by the authors’ copyright and therefore they could do with them what
they wanted, including posting the manuscripts in open repositories. Of course,
that was correct, up until the moment that authors were transferring the
copyright to any of their articles to the publishers. Yet, many publishers
(reluctantly) allowed this practice, as they had allowed it for a long time
already in areas such as physics, where a long-standing habit of preprint
publication existed (arXiv.org) that didn’t appear to harm their subscriptions,
and the conviction that the open repository landscape would be chaotic, deposit
as well as access cumbersome, and repositories would contain all manner of
content with all manner of access restrictions mixed in with open access
material, providing an incentive for institutional and corporate users of the
journals to stick with their subscriptions. That situation has changed very
little. Although it has gradually become easier to find a freely accessible
version of many an article, subscription levels have, on the whole, held up.
And freely accessible ‘green’ articles are often not covered by a CC-BY licence
and thus not freely reusable <a href="" name="OLE_LINK2"></a><a href="" name="OLE_LINK1"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;">in the way the BOAI intended.</span></a> When
copyright has been transferred to the publisher, the author cannot subsequently
attach a CC-BY licence to the version deposited in an open repository. Were
that possible, and habitually done, ‘green’ might be true Open Access. As it
is, ‘green’ articles are free to read (gratis access), but rarely free to
reuse.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But also strategy
two didn’t turn out to be straightforward. The thought was that the only
difficulty to overcome was the necessary cost. Some journals are being kept
afloat by subsidies, and many funding agencies allow ‘article processing
charges’ (APCs) to be paid out of grants, within reason. So seemingly the cost
hurdle could largely be taken, except for unfunded, impecunious authors, to
whom many journals offer APC waivers. Open Access, i.e. articles published with
a CC-BY licence, would result. That straightforwardness proved an illusion,
too. The term Open Access is not an officially standardized one, and various
publishers have started to call articles Open Access even though restrictions
apply that go beyond CC-BY, such as non-commercial clauses (NC). Yet they nonetheless
require author-side payment of APCs. Some even require ‘basic’ APCs for
restricted access, and APC top-ups for true Open Access CC-BY licences. NC
clauses potentially give the publisher the opportunity to exclusively exploit
the article further (e.g. reprints) and realize more income than just the APC.
I say ‘potentially’, because the sale of reprints is a commercial activity, forbidden
by NC, unless copyright has been transferred to the publisher (in which case
commercial exploitation is the publisher’s right) or there is an exclusive
licence in place whereby the author-copyright-holder gives the publisher the
right to do so. An NC clause means, in countries like Germany for instance,
that the article in question cannot be used for educational purposes unless
explicit permission is obtained, which makes the hurdle, in those
circumstances, practically identical to the “all rights reserved” of plain
copyright. The upshot is that ‘gold’ is also not always Open Access in the way
the BOAI intended.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since Open Access
has become an ambiguous term, you cannot trust the label to mean what you think
it does, and certainly not that it allows you to reuse the article. Only CC-BY
does that (and CC-zero, which does away with attribution as well – suitable and
appropriate for data).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Where do we go
from here?</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">FFAR, I would
hope. For data, the concept of FAIR is being proposed (Findable, Accessible,
Interoperable, and Reusable). For journal literature, ‘interoperable’ may not
be a useful notion, so I’d like to modify the idea to Findable, Freely
Accessible and Reusable. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How?
Well, ‘gold’ publication with CC-BY is a good way to achieve it, but there remains
the hurdle of APCs. The International Council for Science, ICSU, has recently
issued a <a href="http://www.icsu.org/general-assembly/news/ICSU%20Report%20on%20Open%20Access.pdf" title="This links to a PDF">report</a>, in which they advocate the following
goals for Open Access:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">free of financial barriers for any researcher to contribute to;</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">free of financial barriers for any user to access immediately on
publication; </span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">made available without restriction on reuse for any purpose, subject to
proper attribution;</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">quality-assured and published in a timely manner; and</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">archived and made available in perpetuity.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">1 and 2 mean that the cost of 4 and 5 need to
be carried by other parties than the user or author. For authors funded by
agencies who support Open Access and are willing to bear the APC costs, there
is no barrier, but of course, not every author is.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no easy way out of this. But it’s not
impossible, in principle. However, ingrained deep conservatism of the scholarly
community, and particularly scholarly officialdom, is in the way. (You’d think
that ‘pushing the envelope’ is endemic to science, but in reality it is applied
to knowledge, not to communicating that knowledge). Imagine the following
scenario:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The authors arrange for peers they trust to review their articles, and
openly endorse their article as worthy of publication;</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Authors publish their article, properly formatted (I’m sure services would
spring up for those who’d rather not do that themselves) and accompanied by the
open endorsements on one of the many free (blog) platforms available, under a
CC-BY licence.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Of course, permanency and archiving in
perpetuity is not guaranteed, but that used to be the responsibility of
libraries in the print era, and they might wish to take that responsibility
again for electronic literature. Central repositories like arXiv, bioR</span><span lang="EN-US">χ</span><span lang="EN-US">iv, PubMedCentral, etc. could do that, too.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m sure someone could come up with
modifications to this scenario that would make it more practicable, technically
robust, and such. But the main hurdle to take is academic officialdom, in
particular the Impact Factor counters, who would have to accept this kind of
publication for career and funding purposes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Achieving true Open Access ain’t easy. So much
is clear.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpLast">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jan Velterop</span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-12103440825932021202014-03-21T11:06:00.000+00:002014-03-21T11:06:56.246+00:00Proposed open access symbol<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have proposed a new Unicode symbol to denote true open access, for instance applied to scholarly literature, in a similar way in which © and ® denote copyright and registered trademarks respectively. The proposed symbol is an encircled lower case letter a, in particular in a font where the a has a 'tail', as in a font like Arial and Times, for instance, (a), and not as in a font like Century Gothic (<span style="font-family: inherit;">without the 'tail' as it were)</span>.<br />
<br />
My proposal should be on the Unicode discussion list (http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist-unicode.html), and I am soliciting support, and input from technically-minded as well as legally-minded open access supporters.<br />
<br />
This is the symbol I have in mind:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEARnMsBLcrIRCKPwvfcKahTp7S_P7soi8kCVrR6IdyKgnhmNpzo69jlsbmHC8AoCSed1Cqwo-TB4PR4sB6r_25FyqwOeEXtAGU-iUgct48MAdWyhckHRFc_lp2JL2pbyEsngeNw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-03-21+at+09.07.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEARnMsBLcrIRCKPwvfcKahTp7S_P7soi8kCVrR6IdyKgnhmNpzo69jlsbmHC8AoCSed1Cqwo-TB4PR4sB6r_25FyqwOeEXtAGU-iUgct48MAdWyhckHRFc_lp2JL2pbyEsngeNw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-03-21+at+09.07.23.png" height="188" width="200" /></a></div>
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Jan Velterop</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-4219912132082759342013-12-11T21:40:00.000+00:002013-12-11T21:40:51.097+00:00Lo-fun and hi-fun<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I have recently been talking to some major (and minor) publishers about what they could do in regard of open access, given the increasing demand, even if converting to ‘gold’ open access models is not realistic for them, in their view. I suggested that they should make human-readable copies of articles freely accessible immediately upon publication. Access to human-readable articles would of course not satisfy everybody, but it would satisfy the ‘green’ OA crowd, if I assume Stevan Harnad is their prime spokesperson. He dismisses machine-readability and reuse as distractions from his strategy of ‘green’ open access, and he even supports embargoes, as long as articles are self-archived in institutional repositories, which is his primary goal. Human-readable final published versions directly upon publication would be an improvement on that. It would also likely satisfy the occasional reader from the general public, who wishes to be able to access a few scientific articles. <br /><br />How could those publishers possibly agree to this? Well, I told them, they could reconsider their view that there is a fundamental difference between the published version of an article and the final, peer reviewed and accepted author manuscript (their justification for allowing the author-manuscript to be self-archived). There may well be, of course, and there often is, but it is not likely to be a material difference in the eyes of most readers. Instead of making much (more than there usually is) of any differences in content, they could distinguish between low-functionality versions and high-functionality ones of the final published article, the ‘lo-fun’ version just suitable for human reading (the print-on-paper analogue), and the ‘hi-fun’ version suitable for machine-reading, text- and data-mining, endowed with all the enrichment, semantic and otherwise, that the technology of today makes possible. The ‘lo-fun’ version could then be made freely available immediately upon publication, on the assumption that it would not likely undermine subscriptions, and the ‘hi-fun’ version could be had on subscription. Librarians would of course not be satisfied with such a ‘solution’.<br /><br />Although initially greeted with interest, the idea soon hit a stone wall. Although no one has explicitly said that they would never do this, the subsequent radio silence made me conclude that among the publishers I talked with the fear might have emerged that a system with immediate open access to a ‘lo-fun’ version accompanied by a ‘hi-fun’ version paid for by subscriptions would expose the relatively low publisher added value in terms of people’s perceptions and in terms of what they would be prepared to pay for it. That fear is probably justified, I have to give it to them.<br /><br />There is no doubt that formal publication adds value to scientific articles. The success of the ‘gold’ open access publishers, where authors or their funders are paying good money for the service of formal publication, is testament to that. There must be a difference – of perception at the very least – between formally published material and articles ‘published’ by simply depositing them in an open repository. That added value largely consists of two elements: 1) publisher-mediated pre-publication peer review and 2) technical ‘production’, i.e. standardised to a sufficient degree, correctly coded (e.g. no ß where a β is intended), ‘internet- and archive-proof’, rendered into several user formats, such as PDF, HTML and Mobile, aesthetically pleasing where possible, interoperable, search-engine optimised, and so forth. The first element is mostly performed by the scientific community, without payment, and although the publisher organises it, that doesn’t amount to a substantial publisher-added value, in the common perception. The second element on the other hand, is true value added by the publisher, is seen as such by reasonable people, and it is entirely justifiable for a publisher to expect to be paid for that. There are some authors who could do this ‘production’ themselves, but the vast majority make a dog’s dinner out of it when they try.<br /><br />There is of course a third element in the equation: marketing. Marketing is responsible for brand and quality perception. Quality mainly comes from good authors choosing to submit to a journal. Getting those good authors to do that is in large part a function of marketing. The resulting brand identity, sometimes amounting to prestige, is also an added value that a self-published article, even if peer-reviewed, lacks. But alas, it is not commonly seen to be an important value-add that needs to be paid for.<br /><br />Having 'lo-fun' and 'hi-fun' versions of articles makes the publishers’ real contribution explicit. That’s the rub, of course.<br /><br />Back to ‘gold’, I’m afraid. Or rather, not so afraid, as ‘gold’ OA doesn’t have any of the drawbacks of ‘lo-fun’. Fortunately ‘gold’ is more and more showing to be a healthily viable and sustainable business model for open access, at least as long as the scientific community sets so much store by publisher-mediated pre-publication peer review (see <a href="http://theparachute.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/essence-of-academic-publishing.html" target="_blank">previous post</a> for my thoughts on that). <br />
<br />
Jan Velterop</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-40005620459928160162013-11-05T18:41:00.000+00:002013-11-05T18:41:53.727+00:00Essence of academic publishing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-US">Let me start with a bit of context, all of
which will be known, understood and widely discussed. The blame of
unaffordability of the ever-increasing amount of scholarly literature, be it
because of high subscription prices or article processing fees for ‘gold’ open
access, is often laid at the door of the publishers. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The blame, however, should be on the
academic preoccupation with the imperative of publisher-mediated prepublication
peer review (PPR).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Of course, publishers, subscription-based
ones as well as open access outfits, have a business which depends to a very
large degree on being the organisers of PPR and few of them would like to see
the imperative disappear. The ‘need’ – real or perceived – for
publisher-mediated PPR in the academic ecosystem is the main <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">raison d’être</i> of most publishers. And it
is responsible for most of their costs (personnel costs), even though it is
actually carried out by academics and not publishers. The technical costs of
publishing are but a fraction of that, at least the cost of electronic
publishing (print and its distribution are quite expensive, but to be seen as
an optional service and not as part of the essence of academic publishing).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Despite it being the imperative in
Academia, publisher-mediated PPR has flaws, to say the least. Among causes for
deep concern are its anonymity and general lack of transparency, highly variable
quality, and the unrealistic expectations of what peer review can possibly deliver
in the first place. The increasing amount of journal articles being submitted
is making the process of finding appropriate reviewers not easier, either. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Originally, PPR was a perfectly rational
approach to ensuring that scarce resources were not spent on the expensive
business of printing and distributing paper copies of articles that were indeed
not deemed to be worth that expense. Unfortunately, the rather subjective
judgment needed for that approach led to unwelcome side effects, such as
negative results not being published. In the era of electronic communication,
with its very low marginal costs of dissemination, prepublication filtering
seems anachronistic. Of course, initial technical costs of publishing each
article remain, but the amounts involved are but a fraction of the costs per
article of the traditional print-based system, and an even smaller fraction of
the average revenues per article many publishers make.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Now, with the publishers’ argument of
avoiding excessive costs of publishing largely gone, PPR is often presented as
some sort of quality filter, protecting readers against unintentionally
spending their valuable time and effort on unworthy literature. Researchers
must be a naïve lot, given the protection they seem to need. The upshot of PPR
seems to be that anything that is peer reviewed before publication, and does
get through the gates, is to be regarded as proper, worthwhile, and relevant
material. But is it? Can it be taken as read that everything in peer-reviewed
publications is beyond doubt? Should a researcher be reassured by the fact that
it has passed a number of filters that purport to keep scientific ‘rubbish’
out? </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Of course they should. These filtering
mechanisms are there for a reason. They diminish the need for critical
thinking. Researchers should just believe what they read in ‘approved’
literature. They shouldn’t just question everything. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Or are these the wrong answers?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Isn’t it time that academics who are
relying on PPR ‘quality’ filters – and let us hope it’s a minority of them –
should stop believing at face value what is being presented in the ‘properly
peer-reviewed and approved’ literature, and go back to the critical stance that
is the hallmark of a true scientist: “why should I believe these results or
these assertions?” The fact that an article is peer-reviewed in no way absolves
researchers of applying professional skepticism to whatever they are reading.
Further review, post-publication, remains necessary. It’s part of the
fundamentals of the scientific method. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">So, what about this: a system in which
authors discuss, in-depth and critically, their manuscripts with a few people
who they can identify and accept as their peers. And then ask those people to
put their name to the manuscript as ‘endorsers’. As long as some reasonable
safeguards are in place that endorsers are genuine, serious and without
undeclared conflicts of interest (e.g. they shouldn’t be recent colleagues at
the same institution as the author, or be involved in the same collaborative
project, or have been a co-author in, say, the last five years), the value of
this kind of peer-review – author-mediated PPR, if you wish – is unlikely to be
any less than publisher-mediated PPR. In fact, it’s likely to offer more value,
if only due to transparency and to the expected reduction in the cost of
publishing. It doesn’t mean, of course, that the peer-endorsers should agree
with all of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">content</i> of the
articles they endorse. They merely endorse its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">publication</i>. Steve Pettifer of the University of Manchester once
presented a perfect example of this. He showed a quote from Alan Singleton
about a peer reviewer’s report<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=12960760#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a>:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">"This is a remarkable result – in fact, I
don’t believe it. However, I have examined the paper and can find no fault in
the author’s methods and results. Thus I believe it should be published so that
others may assess it and the conclusions and/or repeat the experiment to see
whether the same results are achieved."</span><span lang="EN-US"></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">An
author-mediated PPR-ed manuscript could subsequently be properly published,
i.e. put in a few robust, preservation-proof formats, properly encoded with
Unicode characters, uniquely identified and identifiable, time-stamped, citable
in any reference format, suitable for human- and machine-reading, data
extraction, reuse, deposit in open repositories, printing, and everything else
that one might expect of a professionally produced publication, including a facility for post-publication commenting and review. That will cost,
of course, but it will be a fraction of the current costs of publication, be
they paid for via subscriptions, article processing charges, or subsidies. Good
for the affordability of open access publishing for minimally funded authors,
e.g. in the social sciences and humanities, and for the publication of negative
results that, though very useful, hardly get a chance in the current system.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">Comments welcome.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language: JA;">Jan Velterop </span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoCommentText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=12960760#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-US"> Singleton, A. The Pain Of Rejection, <i>Learned Publishing</i>,
24:162–163 </span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span lang="EN-US">doi:10.1087/20110301</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-30281680725770500452013-02-05T14:36:00.001+00:002013-02-05T14:36:58.539+00:00Transitions, transitions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;"></span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Although I am generally very skeptical of
any form of exceptionalism, political, cultural, academic, or otherwise, I do
think that scholarly publishing is quite different from professional and
general non-fiction publishing. The difference is the relationship between
authors and readers. That relationship is far more of a two-way affair for
scholarly literature than for any other form of publishing.</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Broad and open dissemination of research
results, knowledge, and insights has always been the hallmark of science. When
the Elseviers/Elzevirs (no relation to the current company of the same name,
which was started by Mr. Robbers [his last name; I can’t help it] a century and
a half after the Elsevier family stopped their business), among the first true
‘publishers’, started to publish scholarship, for example the writings of
Erasmus, they used the technology of the day to spread knowledge as widely as
was then possible. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">In those days, publishing meant ‘to make
public’. And ‘openness’ was primarily to do with escaping censorship. (Some
members of the Elsevier family went as far as to establish a pseudonymous
imprint, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Marteau" target="_blank">Pierre Marteau</a>, </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Marteau"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;"></span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;"> in order to secure
freedom from censorship). <span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;">But openness in a wider sense — freedom from
censorship as well as broad availability — has, together with peer-review, been
a constituent part of what is understood by the notions of scholarship and
science since the Enlightenment. Indeed, science can be seen as a process of
continuous and open review, criticism, and revision, by people who understand
the subject matter: ‘peers’.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The practicalities of
dissemination in print dictated that funds must be generated to defray the cost
of publishing. And pre-publication peer review emerged as a way to limit waste
of precious paper and its distribution cost by weeding out what wasn’t up to
standards of scientific rigour and therefore not worth the expense needed to
publish. The physical nature of books and journals, and of their transportation
by stagecoach, train, ship, lorry, and the like, made it completely
understandable and acceptable that scientific publications had to be paid for.
Usually by means of subscriptions. However, scientific information never really
was a physical good. It only looked like that, because of the necessary
physicality of the information carriers. The essence of science publishing was
the service of making public. You paid for the service, though it felt like
paying for something tangible.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK2;"></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"></span>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">The new technology of the internet,
specifically the development of web browsers (remember <a href="ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/Mosaic/Windows/Archive/MosaicHistory.html" target="_blank">Mosaic</a>?),
changed the publishing environment fundamentally. The need for carriers that
had to be physically transported all but disappeared from the equation. The
irresistible possibility of unrestrained openness emerged. But something else
happened as well. With the disappearance of physical carriers of information,
software, etc. the perception of value changed. The psychology of paying for
physical carriers, such as books, journals, CDs, DVDs is very different from
the psychology of paying for intangibles, such as binary strings downloaded
from the web, with no other carrier than wire, or optical cable, or even radio
waves. In order to perceive value, the human expectation — need, even — for
physical, tangible goods in exchange for payment is very strong, though not
necessarily rational, especially where we have been used to receiving physical
goods in exchange for money for a very long time. That is not to say that we
wouldn’t be prepared to value and to pay for intangibles, like services. We do
that all the time. But it has to be clear to us what exactly the value of a
service is — something we often find more difficult, reportedly, than for
physical goods.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">This is a conundrum for science publishers.
Carrying on with what they are used to, but then presented as a service and not
‘supported’ by physical goods any longer, can look very ‘thin’. Yet it is clear
that the assistance publishers provide to the process of science communication
is a service <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par excellence</i>. Mainly
to authors ('publish-or-perish') and less so to readers (‘read-or-rot’ isn’t a
strong adage). Hence the author-side payment pioneered by open access
publishers (Article Processing Charges, or APCs).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Although it would be desirable to make the
transit to open access electronic publishing swiftly, the reality of inertia in
the ‘system’ dictates that there be a transition period and method. This
transition is sought in many different ways: new, born-OA journals that
gradually attract more authors; hybrid journals that accept OA articles against
author-side payment; ‘green’ mandates, that require authors to self-archive a
copy of their published articles; unmediated, ‘informal’ publishing such as in
arXiv; even publishing on blogs. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">What may be an underestimated transition —
and no-doubt a controversial one — is a model (a kind of ‘freemium’ model?)
that’s gradually changing from restrictive to more and more open, extending the
‘free’, ‘open’ element and reducing the features that have to be paid for by
the user. I even don’t think it is recognized as a potential transition model
at the moment at all, but that may be missing opportunities. Let’s take a look
at an </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022283608015040"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">example</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">. If you don’t have a
subscription you can’t see the full-text. However, where only a short time ago
you saw only the title and the abstract, you now see those, plus keywords and the
abbreviations used in the article, its outline in some detail, and all the
figures with their captions (hint to authors: put as much of the essence of
your paper in the captions). All useful information. It is not a great stretch
to imagine that the references are added to what non-subscribers can see
(indeed, </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://opencitations.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/science-joins-nature-in-opening-reference-citations/"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">some publishers</span></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;"> already do that), and
even the important single scientific assertions in an article, possibly in the
form of ‘<a href="http://nanopub.org/wordpress/">nanopublications</a>’, on the
way to eventual complete openness. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Of course, it is not the same as full, <a href="http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read" target="_blank">BOAI-compliant open access</a>, but in
areas where ‘ocular’ access is perhaps less important than the ability to use
and recombine factual data found in the literature, it may provide important
steps during what may otherwise be quite a protracted transition from
toll-access to open access, from a model based on physical product analogies to
one based on the provision of services that science needs.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Jan Velterop </span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-85391187060273274402013-01-19T09:15:00.000+00:002013-01-19T09:15:16.200+00:00On knowledge sharing — #upgoerfive<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This post was written with the <a href="http://splasho.com/upgoer5/" target="_blank">#upgoerfive text editor</a>, using only the most common 1000 words in English.<br />
<br />
At one time there was a man who some people thought was god. Other
people thought he was sent to the world by god. This man had two water
animals you could eat and five pieces of other food and he wanted the
many people who were with him to have enough to eat. But two water
animals and five other pieces of food were not enough for the people if
they all had to eat. So the man who some people thought was god and
others that he was sent by god, made the food last until all the people
had had enough to eat. This was a wonder. The people saw this and did
not know if they could believe what they saw. But when it seemed true
that he had a power that no other men or women had, they believed the man
was really god or sent by god, because he could do what other men could
never do at all. This story became very well known. And many people
believe it is about food.<br /><br />But I think it is not about food. I
think it is about food for thought. About what we know, not about what
we eat. Because if we give food that we have to others, we do not have
it anymore for us to eat. But if we tell others what we know, they know
it, too, and we still know it as well. So we can not share our food and
still have it all, but we can share what we know and still have it all.
We should share what we know if it is good for us all. Especially people
who work on knowing more and more every day, as their job. They are
paid by us all to work in their jobs on knowing more and more, and they
really should share what they come to know with us, and in such a way
that we can understand it, too.<br />
<br />
Jan Velterop </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-38129805774871348792013-01-15T09:26:00.001+00:002013-01-15T09:29:03.883+00:00Imagine if funding bodies did this<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">There is apparently a widespread fear that if a ‘gold’
(author-side paid) open access model for publishing scientific research is supported by funding bodies, the
so-called article processing fees, paid for by funders on behalf of authors, might see unbridled increases. This fear is
not unwarranted if not addressed properly. If funders agree to pay whatever
publishers charge, they undermine the potential for competition among
publishers and provide them with an incentive to maximize their income, while
at the same time removing any price sensitivity on the part of the publishing
researcher. However, it is not very difficult to address this problem.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">In order to avoid untrammeled article processing
fee increases, funding bodies should foster competition amongst publishers, and create price
sensitivity to article processing charges in researchers publishing their
results.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Imagine if they did the following:</span></span></span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Require open access publishing of research results; </span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Include in any grants a fixed amount for
publishing results in open access journals;</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Allow researchers to spend either more or less
than that amount on article processing charges, any surplus to be used for the
research itself, or any shortfall to be paid from the research budget; </span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Require any excess paid over and above the
fixed amount to be justified by the researcher to the funder;</span></span></span></li>
<li><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Provide a fixed amount for more than one
publication if the research project warrants that, but so that researchers have
an incentive to limit the number of published articles instead of
salami-slicing the results into as many articles as possible, again by giving
them discretion over how the fixed amounts are spent. </span></span></span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Jan Velterop</span></span></span><div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-26671910327886988672012-09-09T15:11:00.000+01:002012-09-09T15:11:25.460+01:00'Pixels of information'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>My friend Barend Mons wrote to me and I think it is worth sharing his letter on this blog. I checked with him, and he agrees that it can be shared on this blog.</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dear Jan,<br /><br />I'm writing to you inspired by your remark that "OA is not a goal in itself but one means to an end: more effective knowledge discovery". <br /><br />What we need for eScience is Open Information to support the Knowledge Discovery process. As eScience can be pictured as 'science that can not be done without a computer', computer reasonable information is the most important element to be 'open'. </span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>You're right, Barend. That's why I think CC-BY is a necessary element of open access. </i></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As we discussed many times before, computer reasoning and '<i>in silico</i>' knowledge discovery leads essentially to 'hypotheses' not to final discoveries. There are two very important next steps. First, what I would call '<i>in cerebro</i>' validation, mainly browsing the suggestions provided by computer algorithms mining the literature and 'validating' individual assertions (call them triples if you wish) in their original context. 'Who asserted it, where, based on what experimental evidence, assay...?' etc. In other words, why should I believe (in the context of my knowledge discovery process) this individual element of my 'hypothesis-graph' to be 'true' or 'valid'? Obviously in the end, the entire hypothesis put forward by a computer algorithm and 'pre'-validated by human reasoning based on 'what we collectively already know' needs to be experimentally proven (call it '<i>in origine</i>' validation). <br /><br />What I would like to discuss in a bit more depth is the '<i>in cerebro</i>' part. For practical purposes I here define 'everything we collectively know', or at least what we have 'shared' as the 'explicitome' (I hope Jon Eisen doesn't include that in his 'bad -omes'), essentially a huge dynamic graph of '<a href="http://nanopub.org/wordpress/" target="_blank">nanopublications</a>' or actually rather 'cardinal assertions' where identical, repetitive nanopublications have already been aggregated and assigned an 'evidence factor'. Whenever a given assertion (connecting triple) is not a 'completely established fact' (the sort of assertion you repeat in a new narrative without the need to add a reference/citation) we will go to narrative text 'forever' to 'check the validity' in my opinion.<br /><br />Major computer power is now exploited for various intelligent ways to infer the 'implicitome' of what we implicitly know (sorry, Jon, should you ever see this!), but triples captured in RDF are certainly no replacement for narrative in terms of reading a good reasoning, why conclusions are warranted, extensive description of materials and methods etc. So the 'validation' of triples outside their context will be a very important process in eScience for many decades to come. In fact your earlier metaphor of the '<a href="http://opendepot.org/1291/" target="_blank">minutes of science</a>' fits perfectly in this model. 'Why would I believe this particular assertion'? ... Well, look in the minutes by whom, where and based on what evidence it was made'. <br /><br />Now here is a very relevant part of the OA discussion: The time when some people thought that OA was a sort of charity model for scientific publishing is definitely over, with profitable OA publishers around us. The only real difference is: do we (the authors) pay up front, or do we refuse that (for whatever good reason, see below) and now the reader has to pay 'after the fact'. So let's first agree that there is no 'moral superiority', whatever that is, in OA over the traditional subscription model. </span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Not sure if I agree, Barend. OK, let's leave morals out of it, but first of all, articles in subscription journals can also be made open access via the so-called 'green' route of depositing the accepted manuscript in an open repository; and secondly, OA at source, the so-called 'gold' route, is definitely practically and transparently the superior way to share scientific information with anyone who needs or wants it.</i></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We have also seen the downsides of OA, for instance for researchers in developing countries who may still have great difficulty to find the substantial fees to publish in the leading Open Access journals. <br /><br />I believe however, that we have a great paradigm shift right in front of us. Computer reasoning and ultralight 'RDF graphs' distributing the results to (<i>inter alia</i>) mobile devices will allow global open distribution of such 'pixels of information' at affordable costs, even in developing countries. Obviously, a practice that will be associated is to 'go and check' the validity of individual assertions in these graphs. That is exactly where the 'classical' narrative article will continue to have its great value. It is clear that the costs of reviewing, formatting, cross-linking and sustainably providing the 'minutes of science' is costly and that the community will have to pay for these costs via various routes. I feel that it is perfectly defensible that those articles for which the publishing costs have not been paid for by the authors, and that are still being provided by classical publishing houses, should continue to 'have a price'. As long as all nanopublications (let's say the assertions representing the 'dry facts' contained in the narrative legacy as well as data in databases) are exposed in Open (RDF) Spaces for people and computers to reason with, the knowledge discovery process will be enormously accelerated. Some people may still resent that they may have to pay (at least for some time to come) for narrative that was published following the 'don't pay now — subscribe later' adage. We obviously believe that the major players from the 'subscription age' have a responsibility, but also a very strong incentive to develop new methods and business models that allow a smooth transition to eScience-supportive publication without becoming extinct before they can adapt. <br /><br />Best,</span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Barend</span></span></blockquote>
<i>Your views are certainly worth a serious and in-depth discussion, Barend. I invite readers of this blog to join in and engage in that discussion.</i><br />
<br />
<i>Jan Velterop</i><br />
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-69519781053197119142012-08-07T11:43:00.000+01:002012-08-07T11:43:20.929+01:00Open access – gold versus green<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Recently, Andrew Adams contributed to the 'gold' vs. 'green' open access discussion and he wrote this on the LIBLICENSE list (edited for typos):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>There are on the order of 10,000 research instutitions and more than ten times as many journals. Persudaing 10,000 institutions to adopt OA deposit mandates seems to me a quicker and more certain route to obtain OA than persuading 100,000 journals to go Gold (and finding more money to bribe them into it, it would appear – money which is going to continue to be demanded by them in perpetuity, not accepted as a transitional fee – there's nothing so permanent as a temporary measure).</i> (Full message <a href="http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=ind1208&L=LIBLICENSE-L&F=&S=&P=8655" target="_blank">here</a>.)</blockquote>
The LIBLICENSE list moderator would not post my response, so I'm giving it here:<br />
<br />
10,000 research institutes means, in terms of Harnadian 'green' mandates, a need for 10,000 repositories; 100,000 journals (if there were so many; I've only ever heard numbers in the order of 20-25,000 [recently confirmed as in the order of 28K]) does not mean 100,000 publishers. Besides, there is no existential reason for institutions to have a repository and 'green' mandate. The fact that others have repositories and it doesn't have one itself does not harm a research institution in the same way that not being 'gold' (or at least having a 'gold' option) does existentially harm journals in an environment of more and more 'gold' journals. <br /><br />As for costs, there are two things that seem to escape the attention of 'green' advocates (by which I mean those who see no place for 'gold' open access at this stage on the basis that 'green' would be a faster route to OA and would be cheaper):<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>'Green' fully depends on the prolongation of the subscription model. Without subscription revenues no journals, hence no peer-reviewed articles, hence nothing to self-archive but manuscripts, arXiv-style. (That would be fine by me, actually, with post-publication peer review mechanisms overlaying arXiv-oids). The cost of maintaining subscriptions is completely ignored by exclusively 'green' advocates, who always talk about 'green' costing next to nothing. They are talking about the *marginal* cost of 'green', and compare it to the *integral* cost of 'gold'.</li>
<li>Exclusively 'green' advocates do not seem to understand that for 'gold' journals, publishers are not in any position to "demand money". They can only offer their services in exchange for a fee if those who would pay the fee are willing to pay it. That's known as 'competition', or as a 'functioning market'. By its very nature, it drives down prices. This in contrast to the monopoloid subscription market, a dysfunctional market, where the price drivers face upwards. Sure, some APC's increased since the early beginnings of 'gold' OA publishing, when 'gold' publishers found out they couldn't do it for amounts below their costs. But generally, the average APCs per 'gold' article are lower — much lower — than the average publisher revenues per subscription article. And this average per-article subscription price will still have to be coughed up in order to keep 'green' afloat.</li>
</ol>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Price-reducing mechanisms would even work faster if and when the denizens of the ivory tower were to reduce their culturalism and anglo-linguism that currently prevails, in which case we could rapidly see science publishing emerge in places like China, India, and other countries keen on establishing their place in a global market, competing on price. APCs could tumble. Some call this 'predatory gold OA publishing'. Few seem to realise that the 'prey' is the subscription model.</div>
<br />
The recently published <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CFAQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchinfonet.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F06%2FFinch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf&ei=j-ggUPIV7pHRBeiwgbAL&usg=AFQjCNFx2J11qh6Kq8-4xfOFe2guQ1UTNg&sig2=oTAe3_Ool95Sp8MLWQpAWg" target="_blank">Finch Report</a> expresses a preference for immediate, 'libre', open access, and sees 'gold' as more likely to be able to deliver that than 'green'. Meanwhile, 'green' is a way to deliver OA (albeit delayed and not libre) in cases where 'gold' is not feasible yet. That is an entirely sensible viewpoint, completely compatible with the letter – and I think also the spirit – of the <a href="http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read" target="_blank">Budapest Open Access Initiative</a> (BOAI). Incidentally, referring to the BOAI is characterised as "fetishism" (sic) by Andrew Adams.<br /><br />Comparing 'green' and 'gold' is almost, to borrow a phrase from Stevan Harnad, "comparing apples and orang-utans". The Finch report is not mistaken to see 'green' as (<a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&ved=0CFgQFjAIOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchinfonet.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F07%2FRF-article-25-July.pdf&ei=C-IgUJCgC6aK0AXg6YGQDg&usg=AFQjCNG9xzzPCaJEst7D_tSlKfe5yhZfKg&sig2=7SD8mkly8f8wZq5IxgQ6cQ" target="_blank">in the words of Michael Jubb</a>) an "impoverished type of open access, with embargo periods, access only to an authors’ manuscript, without links and semantic enrichment; and severe limitations on the rights of use." After all, in the 'green' <a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html" target="_blank">ID/OA</a> scheme (ID = Immediate Deposit and OA meaning 'Optional Access" here) favoured by Harnad c.s., deposited articles may be made open if and when the publisher permits.<br />
<br />Besides, 'gold' implies also 'green' ('gold' articles can be deposited, without embargo or limits on use, anywhere, and by anyone), where 'green' does not imply 'gold'. A Venn diagram might look like this (below).<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7zjcN69MH0-AycIfIwmO0_D1KqqaMC6ey8ewx2-JwpKUBPOLCf0WdxwMIbDlkC_HX0Qg1TGSPDYLwHm8fPYmdsZsS_P8v5li7JywXCr_lBRP0VzbuRY8wjYmfuNELzCspasmRZQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-08-07+at+12.37.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7zjcN69MH0-AycIfIwmO0_D1KqqaMC6ey8ewx2-JwpKUBPOLCf0WdxwMIbDlkC_HX0Qg1TGSPDYLwHm8fPYmdsZsS_P8v5li7JywXCr_lBRP0VzbuRY8wjYmfuNELzCspasmRZQ/s200/Screen+Shot+2012-08-07+at+12.37.10.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
The Finch group has come to its conclusions because they have clearly learnt the lessons of the last decade. There is nothing — repeat:
*nothing* — that prevents academics to eschew the services of
"rent-seeking" (as Adams put it) publishers. They could easily self-organise (though I
realise that both the words 'could' and 'easily' are probably
misplaced). To expect publishers (for-profit and not-for-profit ones
alike) to refuse providing services that academics are seeking from them
is silly.<br />
<br />
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not against 'green' OA (in spite of what some 'green'-only advocates assert), especially not where there is no other option. The choice is not so much for or against 'green' or 'gold', but emphatically <b>for</b> full, unimpeded open access, however it is delivered, as long as it is "permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." You recognise this last phrase? Indeed, the precise wording of the BOAI.<br />
<br />
Jan Velterop</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-51654445154238279482012-08-01T07:43:00.000+01:002012-08-01T07:43:36.245+01:00The triumph of cloud cuckoo land over reality?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It should be abundantly clear that Open Access policies by Finch, RCUK, Wellcome Trust and many others are very important for the development of universal OA, in that they not only indicate practical ways of achieving it, but also signal to the scholarly community and the wider society interested in scientific knowledge and its advance that OA should be the norm.<br /><br />
The 'sin' that RCUK, Finch and the Wellcome Trust committed is that they didn't formulate their policies according to strict Harnadian orthodoxy. It's not that they forbid Harnadian OA (a.k.a. 'green'), oh no. It is that they see the 'gold' route to OA as worthy of support as well. Harnad, as ultimate arbiter of Harnadian OA (though he has acolytes), would like to see funder and institutional OA policies focus entirely and only on Harnadian OA, and would want them, to all intents and purposed, forbid the 'gold' route. In Harnad's view, the 'gold' route comes into play (as 'downsized gold', whatever that means) only once all scholarly journal literature is OA according to Harnadian rules. These rules are quite specific:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>articles must be published in peer-reviewed subscription journals; </li>
<li>institutions must mandate their subsequent deposit in an institutional repository (not, for instance in a global subject repository); </li>
<li>there must be no insistence on OA immediately upon publication (his big idea is ID/OA — Institutional Deposit / Optional [sic] Access); </li>
<li>here must be no insistence on CC-BY or equivalent (which would make re-use and text-mining possible — OA in his view should just be ocular access, not machine-access).</li>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: left;">
It must be difficult to comply with these rules, and seeing his recent applause, subsequently followed by withdrawal of support, for the RCUK policy, even Harnad himself finds it difficult to assess whether his rules are 'properly' adhered to. It also seems as if his main focus is not OA but mandated deposit in institutional repositories. Probably hoping that that will eventually lead to OA. He would like to see 'gold' OA — OA at source — considered only if and when it is "downsized Gold OA, once Green OA has prevailed globally, making subscriptions unsustainable and forcing journals to downsize." It is the equivalent of opening the parachute only a split second before hitting the ground. It would be the triumph of a dogmatically serial process over a pragmatically parallel one. The triumph of cloud cuckoo land over reality.<br /><br />Open Access is more than worth having. Different, complementary, ways help achieve it. There are many roads leading to Rome.<br /><br />Jan Velterop<br />OA advocate</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-30487424026367530042012-06-11T11:09:00.000+01:002012-06-11T11:09:25.786+01:00Small publications, large implications<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="" name="OLE_LINK6"></a><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">When I recently enjoyed lunch
with Steve Pettifer of Manchester University (the ‘father’ of </span></span><a href="http://utopiadocs.com/"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Utopia Documents</span></span></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">), the conversation turned to nanopublications. Ah, you want to know
what nanopublications are. </span></span></span><a href="http://nanopub.org/"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Nanopublications</span></span></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US"> are
machine-readable, single, attributable, scientific assertions.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Steve posed the question “why would any scientist
believe a nanopublication, particularly if out of context?” Indeed, why would
they? Why should they, well versed as scientists are in the art of critical
thinking. They won’t, at least not without seeing the appropriate context.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Herein lies a great opportunity. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Let me explain. Nanopublications, or rather, their
core in the form of machine-readable object-predicate-subject triples, can be
incorporated in (vast) collections of such triples and used for reasoning, to discover
new knowledge, or to make explicit hitherto tacit or hidden knowledge. Triples
can therefore be very valuable to science. (The </span></span></span><a href="http://www.openphacts.org/"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Open PHACTS</span></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"></span></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US"> project is in the process of establishing the value of this
approach for drug discovery.) Many, perhaps most, scientific articles contain
such single assertions, which could be presented as nanopublications. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">In a recent Nature Genetics commentary called ‘<a href="" name="OLE_LINK4"></a><a href="" name="OLE_LINK3"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"></span></a></span></span></span><a href="http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n4/full/ng0411-281.html"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK3;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"><span lang="EN-US">The Value of Data</span></span></span></span></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK4;"></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK3;"></span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"></span></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">’, Barend Mons <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">et al.</i>
addressed this issue with the metaphor of the chicken and the egg. Now that
eggs (individual assertions) are being distributed (‘traded’), their value
(they all look roughly the same) can only be truly assessed by knowing the
parents. Scientists will always want to personally judge whether a crucial
connecting assertion in a given hypothesis is one they can accept as valid. The
ability to locate where the assertion came from, in which article, in which
journal, by which author, and when it was published – in short the ‘provenance’
of individual scientific assertions functioning in computer reasoning – is
crucial for that. As is the ability to access the article in question.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Scientific publishers should, in their quest to add
value to research publications, expose and clearly present the nanopublications
contained in the articles they publish, particularly those that are believed
(e.g. by the author, or the reviewers) to be unique and new. What’s more, they
should make them openly and freely available, like they do with abstracts, even
publishers that are not yet convinced that they should change their business
models and make all their content open access. And they should not just make
nanopublications open and accessible to human readers, but also to machines,
because only machines are able to effectively process large numbers of
nanopublications, treating each one as a ‘pixel’ of the larger picture that a
researcher is building up. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">So what’s the opportunity?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">Well, openly accessible nanopublications are very
useful for scientific discovery, they are attributable (to author, article, and
journal) and scientist don’t just believe them when they see them, particularly
if the assertion is new to them or when they find it in a process of computer-assisted
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in silico</i>) reasoning. Researchers
will be eager to investigate their source, i.e. check out the article from
which the nanopublication comes. They may cite the nanopublication, and in
doing so, cite the article. An obvious win-win situation for scientists (in
their roles of users and authors) and publishers alike.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK6;"><span lang="EN-US">What are we waiting for?</span></span></span></div>
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<span><span><span lang="EN-US">Jan Velterop </span></span></span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-36877478929611602132012-04-29T18:10:00.001+01:002012-04-29T18:10:27.410+01:00OA not just for institutionalised scientists<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On the Global Open Access List, an email list, a thread has developed on <a href="http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2012-April/thread.html" target="_blank">'Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access'</a>. Of course, true open access means access both for peers (meaning fellow-scientists, in this case, not just members of the UK House of Lords) and for the general public at large, so the discussion is really about what is more important and what is the more persuasive argument to get research scientists to make their publications available with open access. And should that argument mainly be quasi-legal, in the form of institutional mandates.<br />
<br />
My view is this:<br />
<br />
Is it not so that when there is no wide cultural or societal support for whatever law or mandate, more effort is generally being spent on evasion than on compliance and enforcement turns out to be like mopping up with the tap still running? If one should be taking examples from US politics, the 'war on drugs' is the one to look at.<br /><br />Forcing scientists into open access via mandates and the like is only ever likely to be truly successful if it is rooted in an already changing culture. An academic culture with an expectation that research results are openly available to all. By the shame that researchers will be made to feel in the lab, at dinner parties, or in the pub, if their results are not published with open access. Of course that will still be mainly peer-pressure, but changing hearts and minds of peers is greatly helped if there were a societal substrate in which the open culture can grow. Mandates or not, OA will never happen if scientists aren't convinced from within. An appeal to them as human beings and members of society is more likely to achieve that than mandates, in my view. The latter should back up a general change of heart, not be a substitute for it.<br /><br />What is 'the general public' should not be misunderstood and be construed to be only those interested in medical literature. It includes all those interested in the other 999 areas as well. Ex scientists, retired scientists, start-ups and SMEs, scientists interested in another discipline or cross-discipline topics, students, lawyers, reporters, teachers, even hobbyists. Einstein wasn't an institutionalised scientist when he worked on his most important work; he was a patent clerk. <br /><br />Of course, those OA evangelists who wish to pursue mandates should be pursuing mandates. I encourage them to keep doing just that. But to narrow the efforts of OA evangelism to what is stubbornly being called "the quickest route", in spite of it being no more than a hypothesis which<br />certainly over the last decade and a half hasn't proved itself to be as effective as first thought, is a mistake. <br /><br />By all means where there are opportunities to promote mandates let us do that, but not at the expense of making the moral and societal responsibility case for OA. <br />
<br />
Jan Velterop<br />
<a href="" name="334"><br /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-35465315532729743562012-04-11T08:00:00.000+01:002012-04-11T08:00:24.139+01:00'Enriching' Open Access articles<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've been asked what the relevance is of my previous post to Open Access. The relevance of Utopia Documents to Open Access may not be immediately clear, but it is certainly there. Though Utopia Documents doesn't make articles open that aren't, it provides 'article-of-the-future-like' functionality for any PDFs, OA or not. It opens them up in terms of Web connectivity, as it were, and it is completely publisher-independent. So PDFs in open repositories – even informal, author-manuscript ones – and from small OA publishers can have the same type of functionality that hitherto only larger publishers could afford to provide, and then only for HTML versions of articles. <br /><br />PDFs are often getting a bad press, as you probably know, yet according to statistics from many publishers, PDFs still represent by far the largest share of scientific article downloads. PDFs have great advantages, but until now, also disadvantages relative to HTML versions, particularly with regard to the latter's Web connectedness (this – open – article is worth reading: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20110309">http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20110309</a>). This digital divide, however, has now been bridged! The Utopia Documents PDF-viewer is built around the concept of connecting hitherto static PDFs to the Web, and it bridges the 'linkability gap' between HTML and PDF, making the latter just as easily connected to whatever the Internet has on offer as the former (as long as you are online, of course). <br /><br />The new – wholly renewed – version (2.0) of the Utopia Documents scientific PDF-viewer has now been released. It is free and <a href="http://utopiadocs.com/" target="_blank">downloads</a> are currently available for Mac and Windows (and a Linux version is expected soon). Version 2.0 automatically shows Altmetrics (see how the article is doing), Mendeley (see related articles available there), Sherpa/RoMEO (check its open archiving status), etcetera, and connects directly to many more scientific and laboratory information resources on the Web, straight from the PDF.<br /><br />Utopia Documents allows you, if you so wish, to experience dynamically enriched scientific articles. Articles from whichever publisher or OA repository, since Utopia Documents is completely publisher-independent, providing enrichment for any modern PDF*, even 'informal' ones made by authors of their manuscript (e.g. via 'Save as PDF') and deposited in institutional repositories.<br /><br />'Enrichment' means, among other things, easy Web connectivity, directly from highlighted text in the PDF, to an ever-expanding variety of data sources and scientific information and search tools. It also means the possibility to extract any tables into a spreadsheet format, and a 'toggle' that converts numerical tables into easy-to-read scatter plots. It means up-to-date Altmetrics, whenever available, that let you see how articles are doing. It means a comments function that lets you carry out relevant discussions that stay right with the paper, rather than necessarily having to go off onto a blog somewhere. It means being able to quickly flick through the images and illustrations in an article. It means that existing PDFs from whatever source are 'converted', as it were, on-the-fly, to what some publishers call 'articles of the future'. (The original PDF is in no way altered; the 'conversion' is virtual).<br /><br />With Utopia Documents, publishers, repositories, libraries, even individuals with PDFs on their personal sites, can offer enriched scientific articles just by encouraging their users to read PDFs with the free Utopia Documents PDF-viewer, and so get more out of the scientific literature at hand than would otherwise be possible. Utopia Documents is indeed truly free, and not even registration is needed (except for adding comments).<br /><br />Utopia Documents is usable in all scientific disciplines, but its default specialist web resources are currently optimised for the biomedical/biochemical spectrum. <a href="http://utopiadocs.com/" target="_blank">http://utopiadocs.com</a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-67187808959115848942012-04-06T07:41:00.000+01:002012-04-06T07:41:30.433+01:00Pee Dee Effing Brilliant<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Are you a scientist or student? Life sciences? Do you ever read research literature in PDF format?<br />
<br />
Did it ever occur to you that it might be useful, or at least convenient, if scientific articles in PDF format were a bit more 'connected' to the rest of the web? And would enable you, for instance, directly from the text, to:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>look up more information about a term or phrase you're encountering (e..g a gene, a protein, etc.)</li>
<li>look up the latest related articles (e.g. in PubMed, Mendeley)</li>
<li>see, in real time, how the article is doing (Altmetrics)</li>
<li>search (NCBI databases, protein databases, Google, Wikipedia, Quertle, etc.)</li>
<li>share comments with fellow researchers</li>
</ul>
Well, all of that – and much more – is now possible. All you have to do is view your PDFs in the new <a href="http://utopiadocs.com/" target="_blank">Utopia Documents</a>.<br />
<br />
Utopia Documents has been developed by researchers from the University of Manchester, is completely free, and available for Mac, Windows and Linux. It works with all PDFs* irrespective of their origin**.<br />
<br />
I invite you – urge you – to try it out, tell your colleagues and friends, and ask them to tell theirs. And tweet and blog about it. Registration is not necessary, except if you want to make use of the public 'comment' function. Feedback is highly appreciated. Either as a comment on this blog, or directly to the <a href="mailto:info@utopiadocs.com" target="_blank">Utopia crew</a>. And testimonials, too, obviously.<br />
<br />
Disclosure: I work with these guys. A lot. They are brilliant and yet pragmatic. Driven by a desire to make life easier for scientists and students alike.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*With the exception of bitmap-only PDFs (scans)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**From any publisher, and even including 'informal' PDFs as can be found in repositories, or those that you have created yourself from a manuscript written in Word, for instance </span><br />
<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-66342526362638327042012-02-23T09:00:00.000+00:002012-02-23T09:00:29.803+00:00They’re changing a clause, and even some laws, yet everything stays the way it was.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
The title captures the feeling of frustration with the often glacial pace of changes we regard as necessary and inevitable. So we try to influence the speed of change, and one time-honoured tool we take out of the box is the boycott. Boycotts are a way to get things off your chest; even to get some guilt relief, but although there are notable exceptions, they rarely change things fundamentally. Take the Elsevier Science boycott. I understand the feeling behind it, but if their prices were reduced to half of what they are now, or even if they went out of business, would that really be a solution to the problems with which scientific communication wrestles? As many a boycott does, this one, too, is likely to result in ‘changing a clause, changing some laws, yet everything staying the way it was’.<br /><br />A boycott doesn’t alter the fact that we view publishers as publishers. That's how they view themselves, too. However, that is the underlying problem. Perhaps publishers were publishers, in the past, but they are no longer. Any dissemination of knowledge that results from their activities is not much more than a side effect. No, publishers’ role is not to ‘publish’; it is to feed the need of the scientific ego-system for public approbation, and of its officialdom for proxies for validation and scientific prowess assessment in order to make their decisions about tenure, promotion and grants easier and swifter.<br /><br />Crazy line of thought, no? Well, maybe, but look at what happens in physics. The actual publishing – dissemination of information and knowledge – takes place by posting in <a href="http://arxiv.org/" target="_blank">arXiv</a>. Yet a good portion of articles in arXiv – quite possibly the majority, does anyone have the numbers? – are subsequently submitted to journals and formally ‘published’. Why? Well, "peer review" is the stock answer. And acquiring impact factors (even though especially in physics one would expect scientists to pay heed to Einstein’s dictum that “not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”).<br /><br />Clearly, officialdom in physics is prepared to pay, to the tune of thousands of dollars per article, for the organization of the peer review ritual and the acquisition of impact factor ‘tags’ that come with formal publication of a ‘version of record’. So be it. If officialdom perceives these things as necessary and is willing to pay, ‘publishers’ are of course happy to provide them. <br /><br />But one of the biggest problems in science communication, the free flow of information, seems to have been solved in physics, as arXiv is completely open. If arXiv-like platforms were to exist in other disciplines as well, and if a cultural expectation were to emerge that papers be posted on those platforms before submission to journals, and their posting be accepted as a priority claim, we would have achieved free flow of information in those other areas as well.<br /><br />I suspect that the essence of the Federal Research Public Access Act (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Research_Public_Access_Act" target="_blank">FRPAA</a>) is about achieving a situation like the one that exists in physics with arXiv. Given that arXiv has done no discernable damage to publishers (at least as far as I’m aware, and, reportedly, also <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access" target="_blank">according to the publishing arms of the AmericanPhysical Society and the UK Institute of Physics</a>), pushing for the Research Works Act (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act" target="_blank">RWA</a>) instead of making the case for extending an arXiv-like ‘preprint’ system to disciplines beyond physics seems an extraordinary lapse of good judgement.<br /><br />On the other hand, the concern that publishers have about the academic community not being willing for long to pay the sort of money they now do for what is little more than feeding the officialdom monster, is a realistic concern. Unfortunately for them, stopping the evolution of science communication in its tracks is simply not an option. Perhaps the current boycott is one of the rare successful ones, and perhaps it will spur publishers on to reconsider their role and position. There are definitely ways for a publisher to play a beneficial role. Just a small example: I was told of a recent case where the peer reviewer expressed his frustration with the words “Imagine if before it was sent to me for review a professional editor actually read all 40 pages and discovered the heinous number of basic grammatical issues, spelling errors, and typos, and sent it back to the authors or to an English correction service before I had to spend more time on that, rather than on the actual scientific content.”<br /><br />Personally, I think open arXiv-like set-ups in disciplines other than physics are the way forward. Publishers should – and truly forward-looking ones may – establish those themselves, if they don’t want to be reduced to an afterthought in the scientific communication game.<br /><br />We live in hope, though not holding our breath.<br /><br />Jan Velterop<br /><div class="MsoNormal">
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-78826639914964682922012-02-05T16:14:00.002+00:002012-02-05T16:16:10.859+00:00Collaborate, don't frustrate<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
We have seen a fair amount of
activity on the web in the last few weeks with regard to protests, even
boycotts, aimed at prominent publishers. Most of it seems to be about money. When money
is tight, it leads to a fight. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are in the huge pickle of a dysfunctional
system. And that’s certainly not just the publishers’ fault. They just make the
most of the system that is there and that is being kept alive by the scientific
community at large. See my <a href="http://theparachute.blogspot.com/2012/02/publishers-are-not-evil.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>. All publishers are commercial and all want to optimize
their profits, although some, the not-for-profit outfits, optimize their
‘results’ or their ‘surplus’. Same thing, really. It’s just the way the
capitalist system works. The system is dysfunctional because there is no
competition. The scientific community allows it to exist without competition.
Relying on subscriptions for their income makes journals, and their publishers,
monopoloid in an environment where content is non-rivalrous. If the only
options to get from A to B – and you have to get from A to B – are a train or
walking, because there are no roads, then the train company has a hold on you.
And on your money. The situation in science publishing is scarcely different. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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So the solution is introducing competition.
‘Gold’ Open Access publishing does just that, albeit perhaps in a fairly primitive way,
so far. It’s typically a game of new entrants. But in order to be truly
successful, the scientific community at large has to buy in to it. Literally
‘buy’ into it. Publishers can lead the horse to the Open Access water, but they can’t make
it drink.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I won’t hold my breath. And there is so much
else in science publishing, besides money matters, that needs to be improved. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just one example: fragmentation. Fragmentation
is a big, frustrating problem. Particularly for the efficient and effective ingestion of
information. But it need not be so bad. Although science publishers are bound
by antitrust rules, there are areas of a pre-competitive nature where they are
allowed to collaborate. Think standards, think CrossRef. Those forms of
collaboration, for the benefit of science, could be expanded. Other standards
could be introduced, to do with data linking, for instance, with data
representation, computer-readability, interoperability. Things like <a href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ja10/ja10_structured_abstracts.html" target="_blank">structured abstracts</a>.
Perhaps even ontologies and agreed vocabularies for scientific concepts,
analogous to biological and chemical nomenclature. User licences could be
standardized, pre-competitively. <i>Et cetera</i>. There are some sophisticated
features around, but their wide adoption all too often suffers from the
not-invented-here syndrome. Publishers, too, live in an ego-system of their
own.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And it is not just in pre-competitive areas
where fragmentation could be remedied. There are areas that you could call
‘post-competitive’, where collaborations between publishers and
standardisations of practices and technologies could be of tremendous value to
the scientific community, without costing the publishers much, or even
anything. Take fragmentation again. Even if the subscription system were to be
kept alive, publishers could, PubMedCentral-like, deposit all the journal articles
they publish in discipline-central global databases, after, say, a year. The
vast majority of the realizable economic value of annual subscriptions is
realized within a year (that’s why the subscriptions are annual), and although
open access after a year is not ideal, it would be a massive improvement over
the current situation with very little cost to the publishers. And unlike
PubMedCentral, the publishers should, collectively and proactively, set up and
organize these open repositories. Asking funding agencies to help support the future maintenance of such repositories should not be too difficult. It's a conservation issue the responsibility for which cannot and should not be put on the shoulders of potentially fickle private enterprise. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Another area of post-competitive collaboration,
or at least cooperation, would be the so-called ‘enrichment’ of journal
articles. In html as well as in their pdf manifestations. Every publisher seems to have its own ideas, and that’s all very
well, but it doesn’t make life easier for researchers. Why not pool these ideas
and apply them as widely as possible? There is hardly, if any, competitive cost
to that, and a great deal of potential benefit to the scientific community, the
professed aim of virtually all scientific publishers. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It clearly is not beyond the publishers to work
together and create something very useful. Just look at <a href="http://crossref.org/01company/02history.html" target="_blank">CrossRef</a>. It is an
example worthy of being the paradigm for publisher attitudes and behaviour with regard to pre-competitive and post-competitive collaborations. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jan Velterop</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12960760.post-70966603240992969242012-02-05T14:56:00.000+00:002012-02-05T14:56:14.845+00:00Publishers are not evil<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Commercial publishers, as a class, are not
evil. To think so is wrong. They have just been doing what the scientific
community can't or won't do by itself. And like most businesses, they charge
what they can get away with. It’s known as ‘the market’. They can’t be
criticised for existing and functioning in a perfectly legal capitalist market
and regulatory environment. That doesn’t mean they can’t be criticised. Individual publishers can be criticised for their actions and inactions. As an industry, among
the things they can be criticised for are not evolving fast
enough, given the environmental change that the web has brought about. But so
can the academic community. The reliance on old and now effectively dysfunctional
systems and habits from a bygone era is mutual.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Centuries ago, in Europe, non-Christians
were forbidden to belong to the guilds, which made it impossible for them to be
any kind of craftsman, essentially leaving them with few other options than
being an unskilled labourer, trader, or money lender. So some became very
wealthy and thus became the target of envy. And accused of usury and the like. Just
for doing the only thing they were allowed to do and society needed someone to
do. It’s more complicated than that, but it captures the essence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The relevance of this to science
publishing? Well, at a certain point, when science had grown into a sizeable,
professional and global pursuit, academics didn’t, or couldn’t, organise publishing
properly anymore on that global scale. University presses were, by definition,
rather local, and so were scientific societies. Commercial publishers stepped
into the breach, some became very wealthy, and are now the target of envy. Or
at least of criticism of their wealth. And accused of greed and the like. Just
for doing some of the things the academic community needs or thinks it needs,
in the environment of a ‘market’ (starting in the 1950’s with e.g. internationalisation
of science communication; abolishing the sort of author charges the scientific
societies were levying for their journals, standardisation of article
structures, language, et cetera).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Lesson: if you leave it to outsiders to
provide your essential services, because you can’t, or won’t, truly assimilate
and embed those outsiders, and provide the services from within your own circles,
you risk losing control and you cannot blame the outsiders for taking the
opportunities you give them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Jan Velterop</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">PS. The first Open Access publisher was a
commercial publisher. The largest publisher of </span>Open Access articles today is a
commercial publisher. Why are there not more scientist-led initiatives like
PLoS?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6